Rebecca Miller's novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the study of a brave, curious, multilayered woman—an acutely intelligent portrait of the many lives behind a single name. Now a major motion film.
What part of our selves do we hide away in order to have a stable, prosperous life?
Pippa Lee has just such a life in place at age fifty, when her older husband, a retired publisher, decides that they should move to a retirement community outside New York City. Pippa is suddenly deprived of the stimulation and distraction that had held everything in place. She begins losing track of her own mind; her foundations start to shudder, and gradually we learn the truth of the young life that led her finally to settle down in marriage—years of neglect and rebellion, wild transgressions and powerful defiance.