Alice in Bed

By Cathleen Schine

Book Overview

Alice in Bed is, not surprisingly, about Alice in bed. Sound sexy? In part, it is, which is very surprising. For though Alice is indeed as sexy as a bright, beautiful, liberated postadolescent can be, the bed she occupies is a hospital bed, where she is visited by a succession of doctors, good, bad, enormously indifferent to her pain but in several cases extremely responsive to her charms. Mention should also be made of less than dedicated nurses, splitting parents, weirdo relatives, and a multitude of others as mystified as Alice is about the mysterious malady that has placed her in this highly compromised position. Fortunately, Alice is far more than a sexy sickie. She is wise beyond her years, witty past all propriety, and as fresh and funny a heroine as has ever graced the pages of a novel. As a cure for all that ails you, Alice in Bed rivals penicillin and even (dare we say it) chicken soup.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394529820
• ISBN13: 9780394529820
• Release Date: May 1983
• Publisher: Knopf
• Length: 227 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Painful, sexy and hilarious

I've read this book several times and each time I'm struck by it's raw power, delivered with such skilled and playful style that it is all the more effective. It is a book about illness and pain where I don't think the word "anger" is ever used. Alice is a girl we recognize completely but Schine has created her with a fresh perception and gentle wit that in some ways reminds me of Barbara Pym's heroines.

I was a patient, too.

For those of us who have been physically impaired and/or very ill, scared to death children in adult bodies, lost in the mad world of medicine, a must read. A stinging and witty critique of being a patient from the inside out. We can feel and identify with her pain, her fatigue, her helplessness and her addiction to pain and dysfunction. Then, vertical once again and walking the world of "healthy" people, we can feel the fear and pain of being "healthy" once again and still being desperately stuck in life in general and wanting to cling to the comfort of illness and hospitals. It will mean a lot, if you've been there. Written like one who's been there and who has the gift of storytelling to spit every syllable back out in plain, human language.

great book - plain and simple

This was a book I read a long time ago, and it was one of the first books that I noted didn't follow a set pattern or formula. Alice's affair with the doctor came as a surprise as well as the flirtations with her mother's eccentric boyfriend. This book doesn't disappoint, you feel Alice's pain, the physical pain (laced with appropriate sarcastic remarks) as well as the emotional pain she feels when going from a healthy young woman into a bedridden sour soul, back into an upright citizen. I read this book at least 3 times it was that enjoyable, Alice was a fun character to revisit. A+

An hilarious but gut wrenching novel about a girl's illness.

An unusually fresh and astringent comic novel that manages to convey the experience of a terrifying and agonizing illness, as expenienced by a teenage girl, without a hint of cliche. The characters are wonderful, the novel engages the reader on every page. It's sexy and funny and painful.

Engaging - amusing with a quirky, sarcastic heroine.

This books pulls you through unwittingly to the end leaving you wondering how you could possibly be finished already. Alice is a 19 year old curmudgeon on the outside with a soul of a lost child on the inside. --- one question --- do doctors really sleep with patients?