Description:
Amanda is a new mother, and she is breaking. After a fight with her partner, she puts the baby in the car and drives from Queens to her hometown in rural Ohio, where she shows up unannounced on the doorstep of her estranged childhood best friend. Amanda thought that she had left Carrie firmly in the past. After their friendship ended, their lives diverged radically: Carrie had a baby the summer after high school, became a successful tattoo artist, and never escaped Ohio's conservative grid of close-cut grass. But the trauma of childbirth and shock of motherhood compel Amanda to go back to the beginning and to trace the tangled roots of friendship and family in her own life.
Compelling and engaging, Everything Here Is under Control is a raw, honest, occasionally hilarious portrait of the complexity, conflicting emotions, and physical trauma of both modern motherhood and the intense, intimate friendships that women forge in their youth.
Brief description:
Madeleine Lambert received her MFA in acting from Brown University and Trinity Rep. Her performances at Trinity Repertory Company include Shelby in Steel Magnolias and Belle in A Christmas Carol. Madeleine graduated with honors from Duke University with majors in theater studies and English and a minor in French. She attended the School at Steppenwolf in Chicago.
Review Quotes:
"[A] wonderful new novel...[A] precise, poignant, and thrilling story of friendship, motherhood, and the one-way road to adulthood...It's Amanda's emotional journey, urgent and searching, that drives the book, moving it with the pulse and pace of a thriller."
-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"