The controversial and explosive story of how one email can tear a family apart. From the publishers of The Slap, this international bestseller is a provocative fictional exploration of the way we live now.
It could happen to any family...What if it happened to yours? When the Bergamots move to a new well-to-do neighbourhood, they're unsure how well they'll adapt. Soon though, Richard is consumed by his executive role and Liz, who has given up her academic career, is hectically playing mother to four-year-old Coco and fifteen-year-old Jake. But the day Jake unthinkingly forwards his friends a sexually explicit email attachment from a young girl is the last day of the Bergamots' comfortable middle-class existence. Faced with impossible choices, what Richard and Liz do next risks destroying not only their marriage, their daughter and their place in the community, but also Jake - the child they have set out to protect.
'Helen Schulman's trenchant social observations and precise, lucid writing are brought to bear on the timely story of a crisis in the life of the Bergamot family.... Schulman takes on a controversial topic with depth, evenhandedness, and warmth. Spare and focused, This Beautiful Life packs a wallop.' -- Kate Christensen, author of The Epicure's Lament and The Great Man
Author
About Helen Schulman
Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day at the Beach, P.S., The Revisionist, and Out of Time, and the short story collection Not a Free Show. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at The New School. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
