My Life, Starring Dara Falcon: A Novel

307 pp. "Dara Falcon is brilliant, manipulative, a pathological liar. The novel's narrator, Jean Warner, is perfect prey for her. Suddenly Jean's life, her marriage--her idea of herself--are dramatically wrenched out of their seemingly comfortable, if unexamined, balance. And in the process, one of Ann Beattie's urgent themes--the sometimes subtle and sometimes startling difference between how things look and how things are--is compellingly explored."