Any Place I Hang My Hat: A Novel

by Susan Isaacs

Book Overview

Amy was barely born with a spoon in her mouth let alone a silver one. Her mother abandoned her before her first birthday and her father, a small-time crook, was in jail more time than he was out.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743463137
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Pocket Star
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 1.0" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

Another great Isaacs story

I thoroughly enjoyed "...Hat." Admittedly, some of the political references went over my head, but they underscored Amy's intelligence and depth (I loathe lead females that can't walk & chew gum at the same time.) I kept getting annoyed with her neediness for an ex she didn't seem to want, but her "eat or be eaten" past explained that. Bestie Tattie was a hoot! And the boss ... well, what can one say about flatulence?!! While no other story can measure up to "Shining Through," this was a terrific read by my favorite author -- with an outstanding cast of supporting characters!!!

engaging and helpful

I picked this book up in the airport at the beginning of one of those travel days from hell. It saved me. Amy, the main character in this book, has been motherless since before she can remember. And fatherless for much of her life while her dad, Chicky, does time in prison. She fears she will end up like Chicky, stealing cars and doing time. But her greater fear is that she has her mother's child-leaving gene, despite her Harvard/Columbia scholarship education and weighty job as a political correspondent at a serious magazine. You see, her smarts are her mother's, and she's really nothing like Chicky. Her fear, and the circumstance of being at a campaign fund raiser where the [...]child of the candidate shows up to announce his parenthood, lures her into finding her mother despite arguments against this strategy from her dad and best friend. What made me love this book was the way Issacs was able to make Amy embody the feelings and actions of someone who has never quite gotten enough emotional support to feel stable in this world, to have any confidence that she's valuable and can be loved. But Amy "gets over it." So it's hopeful for those of us who are looking for that feeling that we are OK. It may end a little too neatly, but fiction is fiction and I for one can like a happy ending.

Home is Where the Heart Is

There is an underlying sadness and profound pathos at the core of Susan Isaacs' "Any Place I Hang My Hat" despite the steely resolve and goal-oriented determinism of its heroine, Amy Lincoln. For Amy is basically an orphan, abandoned by her Mother and her father, Chicky who spends most of his life in prison. But Amy perseveres and makes a good life for herself but is haunted by the specter of her Mother: why did she leave me, where is she now? Besides an innate talent at writing, the aforementioned determinism and a coterie of good friends and relations, Amy has one hell of a sense of humor. Her best friend Tatty has decided to move back home after another failed marriage and has invited Amy over for dinner: "Tatty avoided looking at me, as she usually did at times like these, after (Tatty's parents) M and D had set sail on their nightly voyage from conviviality to stupor." Or when Amy accompanies Tatty to what is in reality a "Meat Market": "Blue J's was something out of a horror movie in which aliens sucked out your essence and turned you into them. Tatty, meanwhile, patted the under curled ends of her sprayed-stiff, dark blond hairdo. Being old money allowed her to use visible hair spray. Nouveau riche blond hair had to flutter-if not fly-in a breeze." Isaacs has cast Amy as Modern Every Woman: never able to commit to a man, wary of Men who do want to commit, scared of Men who are better looking than she: "But I'd never been able to stand guys, handsome or froggy, who pose questions...Where did you go to school?...in a smarmy tone, as if the real question was...Do you like to f**k standing up while eating egg salad?" But family or the lack thereof is what most ails Amy and as usual her take on it is hilarious, though bittersweet: "Even when it was a dysfunctional family-like Tatty's, with her father so drunk he took a nap at the table with his cheek on the roast goose-I was jealous and resentful that I wasn't part of it." Susan Isaacs has written a hilarious book about families, relationships and the search for a Bond. And, despite all the self-help books, despite the self- help television programs, despite the abundance and variety of food, jobs available, leisure time, this Bond continually eludes most of us. What it all boils down to then, is giving and getting Love and more to the point finding someone with which to share it: nothing earth-shaking, nothing otherworldly. But Isaacs has filled the pages of "Any place..." with wit, candor and gorgeous plump prose. And that is not run-of-the-mill, by any means.

More than a "women's" book

Since she burst onto the mystery scene with Compromising Positions, Susan Isaacs has created plots featuring strong heroines who find page-turning conflict in the most mundane worlds. Here she steps away from the suburbs into slightly edgier territory. Amy Lincoln, a mature 29-year-old political writer, has risen from a beyond-dysfunctional home in the projects. Following a scholarship to a select prep school, she fought her way into Harvard and then Columbia Journalism School. And now she's feeling stranded. Her too-good-to-be-true boyfriend doesn't seem to be moving to marriage. Her best friend is between marriages. Her father, released from prison for the third time, won't introduce her to his new girlfriend; after all, he's been passing for 36. It's not clear what pushes Amy to start asking questions about her past after all this time. Maybe she is inspired by a young man who crashes a senator's reception, claiming to be a long lost son. For some reason, she gets her father to talk about her long-lost mother, then uses her reportorial skills to track down the missing family. As Amy explores her roots, we're treated to a detailed description of just about everyone she meets -- even people who just walk onstage for a few pages. These detours add color to the novel and I for one didn't mind slowing down. The climactic scene pulls the book together, striking just the right note. We realize how cruelly Amy's mother set events in motion that harmed everyone she knew: her own parents, Amy's father and ultimately Amy herself. True, Amy went to good schools, but there's a hint of scar tissue when she deals with past and present relationships. Sometimes Amy seems extremely mature for a 29-year-old; after all, the author's quite a bit older. She's been through a lot, though, so her character is plausible. Her romantic life is a little more far-fetched, and the ending seems to doom the book to the "women/romance" category. Overall, though, I enjoyed this book. I get tired of whiny, helpless heroines who can't seem to take charge of their lives, so I found myself liking Amy's strength and her willingness to accept the consequences of her own actions.

Better and better and better . . .

Issacs's novels aren't mere replays of one another. The protagonist of each is a woman, but they're not "women's novels" -- or not merely that, anyway. This one isn't a mystery, as some of her best have been, but it's certainly suspenseful. Thirty-year-old Amy Lincoln ("no relation") is a more-than-competent New York political analyst and journalist at IN DEPTH, a magazine so serious it doesn't run pictures at all. Despite her degrees from Harvard and Columbia School of Journalism, she grew up in the projects, the daughter of a mostly likeable but only semi-successful small-time criminal and a mother who disappeared when she was a few months old, dumping her in the reluctant lap of her Grandma Lil, a part-time leg-waxer. Her background left her with a rather confrontational style and very chary of commitment in relationships, even though for two years she's been with the pretty much terrific John Orenstein, a documentary film maker who pushes all her passion buttons but with whom she is convinced she ought to break up. But all that is just the background to this multilayered story. While covering a private money-raiser by a presidential candidate, she witnesses a young, personable gate-crasher's claim to be the senator's illegitimate son. As she gets involved, against her better ethical judgment, with his quest for acceptance, she comes to the realization that she must also uncover the truth about her own mother and the theft of a diamond ring that sent her father to jail for the first time. She's an expert researcher and (speaking as someone in a similar line of work) I found the process fascinating. But Amy's search is only the means to discovering who she is, whether she's really her mother's daughter in terms of bent psychology, and what to do about John. The story is set, rather pointedly, against the backdrop of the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, but I'm not sure I see the relevance. And there are also frequent flashback references to the events of September 11, as is probably inevitable for any future novel set in present-day New York City, but at least they play some part in the characters' personal lives. This certainly isn't a "funny" book, but Isaacs's dry wit and droll capsule descriptions add a leavening of humor that keeps things on an even keel. And her spot-on depictions of the supporting characters are marvelous. Every novel this author writes is better than the one before.

It's hard to believe that over 25 years have passed....

.....since author Susan Isaacs penned her "Compromising Positions" yarn about a middle-aged suburban housewife. In THAT book, which may seem ordinary today, Isaacs broke a lot of rules. She wrote about the suburban mom vs. working woman in a manner that poked fun at both. She let her heroine have an adulterous fling, and, somehow, it seemed all right in a day and age when the sexual revolution was just something hippies were involved in. Over the years, in nine novels (ten, now!) Isaacs has given me much pleasure and literally has me stop and say more than once throughout each book-"that's happened to me...". My personal favorite of Isaac's novels is "After All These Years", but, then, I never met an Isaacs novel I didn't love. I credit Susan Isaacs with starting the "chick lit" era, and she is a master. Her novels don't just make light of women facing issues, they generally are themed for a woman who is just discovering a whole lot about herself that she never knew. "Any Place I Hang My Hat" is no exception, although the heroine, Amy Lincoln (a 30-something Jewish-Italian New Yorker from the slums, with a missing mother who walked off and left her and a father ("Chicky") who has lived a life incarcerated, on and off)doesn't realize right away that she's destined to try to find her true self. Naturally, Amy's used her wits and her knack for hard work and fitting in to go first to an exclusive boarding school, all expenses paid, then on to Harvard and Columbia to study journalism. She's a political writer for "In Depth" - a quality magazine with an educated following, and she's been involved for more than two years with a documentary filmmaker, John Orenstein. She's got a longer relationship, for a decade and a half, with rich, exotic Tatty, her best friend. The two met in boarding school when Tatty insulted her and Amy retaliated by punching her in the mouth. Tatty naturally does not have to work for a living, but chose a career in gourmet occasion cake making, after her two marriages failed. Isaacs normally draws me in with a more middle-aged heroine, but in the brilliant little journey that Amy makes to find herself in the novel, we quickly learn that she has an old soul. Involved in the early part of the Democratic run for a presidential candidate, with a clever mix of real and imagined candidates, Amy's struck by the parallel between a young Hispanic man who crashes a fund-raiser, claiming the blueblooded Senator who is running for office is his father. Amy's own life has been lived trying not to speculate on why and how her mother, Phyllis, left her in the care of crazy Grandma Lil and jailbird Chicky. Phyllis never once looked back, and Amy has to decide - does she want to find Phyllis and find the answers to all those questions or is it just safer to leave the genie in the bottle? Interspersed with the quest for her identity are the often humorous anecdotes of Amy's struggle with editorial control at the magaz