Rita Ciresi – författare

Angel Lupo grew up in a traditional Italian home — an exclusive club where Mama’s word was everything ... and where nice girls saved themselves for marriage. All Angel wanted was to be movie-star blond, change her name, and get as much attention as her prettier older sister Lina.Now Angel is nearing thirty, penning Catholic greeting cards for a living, and still jealous of her sister, who has a house in the suburbs, two kids, and a husband who loves her. So Angel does the next best thing: She answers a personal ad.Dirk Diederhoff is blond, teaches at Vassar, and is definitely not Italian. Nor is he the thrill-a-minute lover and soul mate Angel prays for. But as Lina, recklessly embarked on an affair of her own, would tell her: There are no perfect tens out there — only men who want you to talk to them in Italian during sex. The award-winning author of Pink Slip gets the rituals and rhythms of domestic life just right in Sometimes I Dream in Italian, a bittersweet comedy about sisters, lovers, and a family that doesn’t quite translate.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Lisa Diodetto''s mother may be ready for her to get married but Lisa isn''t. At her sister''s wedding she ducks when the bridal bouquet comes floating her way, and the only "eligible bachelor" in Lisa''s life is her beloved gay cousin, Dodie.Ditching her life as an underpaid, oversexed publishing drone in Manhattan, Lisa takes a lucrative spot at a more conservative company, and begins writing--on company time--a novel that pokes fun at corporate life. Enter Lisa''s main character: her new boss, Eben Strauss. A man of manners and caution, Strauss manages to bring out the best bad girl in Lisa. And before they know it, two very different people from two very different worlds are doing the one thing you should never do at the office: falling in love.In her funny, familiar, heartbreaking new novel, the award-winning author of Blue Italian weaves a tale of family, work, sex, and love--and of all the things we try to leave behind but never really can. . . .From the Trade Paperback edition.

No one blends humor and heartbreak like Rita Ciresi, whose award-winning novels are lauded as much for their generous wit as for their unflinching honesty. Ciresi’s crowd-pleasing novel Pink Slip captivated readers and critics alike, introducing two utterly unforgettable characters and a love story both bittersweet and comic. Now Ciresi returns to the people and place of that irresistible bestseller in a riotous and rueful, sexy and poignant tale of married love…a novel that asks how two people who fell desperately, passionately, heartbreakingly in love can sustain a second act.It’s Valentine’s Day, and Lisa Strauss, nee Diodetto, is spending it playing dutiful wife at a $100-a-head benefit instead of in bed with Eben, her hardworking husband of (is it only?) five years. Once upon a time, Lisa, too, was a member of the corporate workaday world--until she fell in love with her boss (Eben), gave birth to a cute but rambunctious son, and gradually morphed into a stay-at-home mom. Somewhere in the mix Lisa also is a writer with ambitions of fame and glory, but those dreams seem to be shrinking, along with her sex life. That is, until a hotshot literary agent shows interest in Lisa’s magnum opus.Suddenly, she has a pen name, and an excerpt of her book appears in Playboy. In between revising chapters, Lisa is trying--and failing miserably--to get pregnant again. She’s going house-hunting with Cynthia Farquhar, the gorgeous blond Realtor/divorcee who has become her closest confidante (and the object of Eben’s secret fantasies). And she’s wondering if this is all marriage is and can ever be: bonded for life to a man who may never again be the red-hot lover of their pre-marriage union. In fact, he just may turn out to be the conflicted protagonist of her novel--a devoted family man whose moral fiber may not be strong enough to withstand the slings and arrows of lust and temptation. As their lives begin to bizarrely mirror aspects of Lisa’s book…as marital life as they know it teeters on the edge of utter chaos, Lisa and Eben search--apart and together--for the answer to the question that has plagued husbands and wives since time immemorial: Can love survive marriage?In a wickedly funny, right-on-target look at love and relationships, Rita Ciresi peels back the layers of a marriage with equal doses of hilarity and humanity. Filled with all the zest, zingers, and unexpected surprises of life, Remind Me Again Why I Married You is this uncommonly gifted author at her lusty and liberating best.