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Laura Zigman


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Laura Zigman grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course.

She spent ten years working in New York in book publishing where she was a publicist for Times Books, Vintage Books, Turtle Bay Books, Atlantic Monthly Press, and Alfred A. Knopf.

After moving to Washington, D.C. and working briefly as a project manager for The Smithsonian Associates and a consultant for Share Our Strength, an anti-poverty non-profit group, she finished her first novel. Animal Husbandry was published in 1998 by The Dial Press and became a national bestseller. It was published in fourteen countries and in 2001 the film based on the book, Someone Like You, starring Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman, was released by Fox 2000. Her second novel, Dating Big Bird, also published by The Dial Press, came out in 2000, and her third novel, Her, published by Knopf followed in 2002. Her latest novel, Piece of Work, to be published by Warner Books on September 25, 2006 , is based on her experiences as a publicist and has been optioned by Tom Hanks' production company, Playtone Pictures, with My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardalos set to write the screenplay and star in the movie .

She currently lives outside Boston with her husband and young son.
 

Genres: General Fiction
 
Novels
   Animal Husbandry (1997)
     aka Animal Attraction
   Dating Big Bird (1999)
   Her (2002)
   Piece of Work (2006)
   Separation Anxiety (2020)
   Small World (2023)
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Non fiction show
 
Laura Zigman recommends
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Rouge (2023)
Mona Awad
"Rouge is a fever dream--a brilliant, intense, unforgettable horror story about a beauty cult with a deeply moving mother-daughter story at its core. Mona Awad's signature and singular imagination and black humor and empathy are on full display here, and her wild-ride of a tale is masterfully grounded in the emotional devastation of childhood and grief. I loved every word of this."
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Really Good, Actually (2023)
Monica Heisey
"If Bridget Jones had a long-lost Canadian niece, it would be Monica Heisey's utterly lovable hot-mess of a young divorcee, Maggie. Her voice is so fresh and funny and true, it feels like you've never heard it before, yet so familiar that you will follow it anywhere. Really Good, Actually will also totally make you want to marry each and every one of its comic digressions (the mid-heartbreak Google Searches; the Unanswered Texts, the Tinder Correspondences) because they are so perfect and brilliant and because really, what's better than the deep black humor of heartbreak?"
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We All Want Impossible Things (2022)
Catherine Newman
"This is an absolute heartbreaker of a novel. Catherine Newman's book, through deceptively simple language and everyday moments experienced during a friend's hospice death - funny, sad, regretful, hopeful - is a celebration of life. For anyone who has prepared a hole in their heart for loss, We All Want Impossible Things is a reminder that, in time, that hollowed hallowed space is also there for when the light and love from grief pour back in."

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