Then She Found Me

Categories: Movies & Books , Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction

Thirty-something high school Latin teacher April Epner has never had any desire to find the woman who gave her up for adoption.  Her adoptive parents were perfectly loving, if rather restrained, and she is contented with her single state and quiet career.

But into her tidy life bursts Bernice Graverman, a flamboyantly self-dramatizing woman who wears “toad sized clip-on earrings” and “wet-look white eyeshadow.”  Bernice, who is a local talk show host, confessed to her TV audience that she once gave up a child for adoption, and the ratings were so good (“You didn’t happen to see the show, did you?”) that tracking down April was the inevitable next step.

That’s how Elinor Lipman’s 1990 debut novel Then She Found Me begins.  The rest of it is just as wryly funny and perfectly pitched. 

April is dizzied by Bernice, who hints that Jack Kennedy is her father, meddles irrepressibly in her love life, and stages a grand reunion in Oprah-like excess on her show. 

Fortunately, April has the school librarian, Dwight Willamee, as an ally to track down the truth about her parentage and to help deflect Bernice’s matchmaking efforts. 

The family that April finds might not be storybook, but Lipman’s novel is a great read, unsentimentally spot-on, zestful, and funny.  The beleaguered April and the colorful Bernice are delightful characters, as are a whole cast of supporting players.

The novel has been filmed and is due for release soon.  Helen Hunt directs and stars, and Bette Midler plays Bernice—perfect casting, though I understand that the plot has undergone some tweaking.

If you can’t get hold of the novel (movies always make for high demand), try my other favorite Lipman novel, Isabel’s  Bed, in which another mousy woman finds her life changed in surprising ways when she agrees to ghostwrite the autobiography of a notorious blond bombshell.