I’m Losing You

PLUME BOOKS

I'M LOSING YOU

BRUCE WAGNER
is the author of
Dead Stars, Memorial, The Chrysanthemum Palace
(a PEN Faulkner fiction award finalist),
Still Holding, I'll Let You Go
, and
Force Majeure
. He lives in Los Angeles.

Praise for
I'm Losing You

“Ruthlessly hip and very funny.”

—
Wired

“Edgy, sublime.”

—
New York Newsday

“Wagner's verbal animation rarely flags…. His prose writhes and coruscates.”

—John Updike,
The New Yorker

“The author's images, tones and language give
I'm Losing You a
hard beauty that glints like a black crystal.”

—
Time

“Wagner's latest novel makes all other Hollywood satires Capraesque in their innocence.”

—
Will
Self

“One of the year's most notorious books…a living satire of a dying Hollywood…a must read.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“A black farce played with brute force…. Wagner improves upon the Hollywood-equals-hell novel…with an intricately woven jump-cut montage of deeply twisted parents, children, doctors, filmmakers, agents, writers, and actors who lay waste to each other's lives and score movie deals from the carnage.”

—
Details

“Mr. Wagner…treats us to many glorious phrases and whole passages that have the self-propelled rhythm of great prose.”

—Adam Begley,
New York Observer

“Electrifying…a viciously funny, kaleidoscopically plotted Hollywood satire. Will invite comparisons to Robert Altman, Tom Wolfe, or any other modern Swift or Pope you can think of.”

—
Boston Book Review

“Funny, mordant, erudite, affecting, perverse, hyperverbal…. Wagner is huge.”

—
Washington Times

“A literary novel of Hollywood—a rare event, to be sure. I can't think of any novel in recent memory that has provoked such a rush of uneasy accolades…. So dense as to be almost tactile.”

—
Variety

“Mordantly funny and morbidly real,
I'm Losing You
is a giant, decadent hot-tub party….A great, gossipy treat.”

—
Philadelphia Inquirer

“A Hollywood of neurotic self-destructive sex and technology-obsessed locals—and those are the
nicer
people. Epic.”

—
Women's Wear Daily

“A funnier and even more brutal Hollywood send-up than his previous novel,
Force Majeure
…brilliant.”

—
New York Post

“All of [the characters] are finely, beautifully drawn…. Wagner manages to breathe so much life into them that even their most despicable acts are understandable.”

—
The Advocate

“Makes the nonfictional
You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
look like a Hollywood valentine.”

—
Glamour

“A deliciously guilty pleasure…perfect beach reading for the millennium.”

—
Newsday

“The most distinctive Jewish novel since
Portnoy's Complaint.
”

—
Jewish Journal

“A meditation on moral corruption and loss which is at turns hilarious, tragic, and at times as caustic as a shot of kerosene.”

—
Detour

“Compared to this novel, the Hollywood disenchantments of Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald seem gently nostalgic.”

—
Books of the Southwest

“An ambitious and complex literary novel…one of the best serious books published this year.”

—
Sun-Sentinel

“A dazzling prose stylist.”

—
Hartford Courant

I'M LOSING YOU

B
  R  U  C  E
    W
  A  G  N  E  R

A PLUME BOOK

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

I'm Losing You
is a work of fiction. The characters, conversations, and events in the novel are the products of my imagination, and no resemblance to the actual conduct of real-life persons, or to actual events, is intended. Although, for the sake of verisimilitude, certain public figures do make incidental appearances or are briefly referred to in the novel, I have included them here without their knowledge or cooperation; their interactions with the characters I have invented are wholly my creation and not intended to be understood as descriptions of real events or to reflect negatively upon any of these public figures; nor to suggest that they ever sought or participated in any psychiatric or psychological treatment.

B
OOK
1: Impala

B
OOK
2: Women in Film

B
OOK
3: A Guide to the Classics

B
OOK
4: The Grande Complication

 

It seemed only yesterday that Serena Ribkin was a vibrant, no-regrets member of the Lie—that seventy was “young”—but now she lay bedridden in her frazzled palace with a bad case of colon cancer. Ten months ago, her party, so to speak, had been crashed by a pain-freak hooligan; she duly protested, thinking the intruder could be sassed or paid off, cajoled to leave. Unflappably, she submitted herself to resection and the roughing-up of a good chemo. But when they indecorously cut away thirty-six inches of bowel (not to would be suicide, Donny said), everything changed: the skinhead sodomized her in front of the guests and she had no choice but to give him run of the house. She knew all would be smashed now, every secret-recessed thing. At least, while revelers were slaughtered below, the invader allowed her lucidity and television privileges—that was something, anyway. Now Serena lay stuporous in her cloacal chambers, on the protective-plastic-covered California King. Far from the madding crowd, as they used to say.