Listening to Billie — Alice Adams

“She commands her material so well that we are made to believe that her fiction -- her plot -- is no stranger than our lives.”  --Ms. Magazine
 
Listening to Billie is a brilliant portrait of a contemporary woman adventurously, decisively embarked on her own life.
 
We first glimpse Eliza Hamilton Quarles as a blonde boarding-school student, sitting in a sophisticated New York club, listening to Billie Holiday. She is on the brink of her marriage to her older, worldly date. Twenty years later, a mother, divorced, she, tentatively begins a new life, with new lovers, new interests, new strength, even a new, more comfortable identity.