Piece of Work

Julia Einstein's three-month maternity leave from her high-powered PR firm has stretched to three years. She loves the simple if mindless routine she shares with her young son, Leo. Too soon, however, Julia's dreams of endless mornings eating organic snacks and watching public television cartoons come crashing down. Her husband, Peter, has been laid off, and Julia, now several dress sizes larger and with an intellect as airy as Pirate's Booty ("the rich man's Cheetos"), is forced to leave Leo and return to work.

Hired by the John Glom agency, a PR firm that specializes in the comebacks of has-beens, Julia finds herself babysitting former film legend Mary Ford, as full of tantrums and demands as any 3-year-old. Mary chants hurtful nursery rhymes and steals pricey clothes from photo shoots and has driven away other publicists and her own children; in short, she doesn't play well with others. While Julia is enduring a slimy boss, an impossible client and desperate loneliness, back at home Peter is turning his organizational skills to the "flow" of their house and neighborhood preschool, auditioning to be "her understudy, her replacement, her own personal All About Eve."

Mary is poised to make her comeback, a la Elizabeth Taylor, with a new signature fragrance, Legend. But Legend is über-stinky, the public doesn't bite, and Julia and Mary find themselves increasingly downgraded from first class and the Hay-Adams to coach and the Disney World Magic Kingdom Hotel. When PETA finds out that Legend was tested on animals and Mary's estranged activist daughter jumps on board, Julia uses the lessons she learned as a stay-at-home mom to save the day and scatter, like scented magazine blow-in cards, happy endings for everyone.

Piece of Work is ostensibly grounded in reality: Zigman gleefully names such real-life has-beens as Meredith Baxter-Birney, David Cassidy and Justine Bateman, and her characters frequent the familiar box stores of suburbia (there are so many plugs for the Container Store, I wondered if Zigman had been secretly hired by them). But the plot is pure Hollywood fiction. It's difficult to believe that Julia, a 15-year PR veteran, could be so clueless after only three years at home, and the PETA/Mommy Dearest complication at the end feels both contrived and clichéd. Too often, Zigman hammers home her points, as in Mary Ford's "Merchant of Venice"-inspired soliloquy delivered at the Magic Kingdom wildlife safari: "I traded what should have been most precious to me -- my children, my family -- not for a wilderness of monkeys, but for just one stupid monkey. Fame. As short-lived and fleeting and fickle as it always was." The society that creates celebrity and discards it, that forces parents to choose between work and family, goes basically unexamined.

Zigman does better grappling with the upheaval of gender roles and the ways a woman's priorities shift with motherhood. Julia, who used to squire the likes of Ted Danson and Shirley MacLaine across country, is now jealous of being stuck at work while the rest of her family gets to go to Costco, and she can discuss what her young son ate for lunch with all the seriousness of global warming and geo-politics. As the mother of two 3-year-old boys, I found myself tearing up over a tenderly mundane telephone conversation that Julia has with Leo about his new train while she's stuck in a sterile hotel room with an abusive has-been. It's a moment sure to wring the heart of any woman who has ever left her children for a business trip -- or book tour.

If Zigman's stale plot is unworthy of the emotional issues she tackles far more faithfully and engagingly, Piece of Work is still a sweet and often funny book, just the sort of thing you'll be happy you tucked into your bag when you find yourself waiting in line at, say, the Container Store.

Reviewed by Sheri Holman
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