Picture Katie Couric, at the height of her “Today” popularity.
Now picture Katie calling a guest something unprintable when she thinks her mike is off.
Yeah, that’s hard to do.
Such a moment sends the career of Anna Quindlen’s Meghan Fitzmaurice down the tubes in her new novel, “Rise and Shine.” Meghan is America’s darling, greeting millions over their morning coffee with her catchphrase, “rise and shine.” She’s sought after in New York for every benefit dinner, every speech. And she’s known as being faultlessly gracious (she’ll stay for the dinner and the dancing.) And she’s also known for the wonderful relationships she has with her husband, Evan, and her son Leo.
But one morning, Meghan interviews a guest who is in the process of leaving his wife for the surrogate mother who is carrying the children he and his wife had planned to raise. Meghan rips the guest to shreds on camera. Then, after sending the show to commercial, she utters an obscenity that is picked up and broadcast for all America to hear. Her “apology” when she is allowed back on the air isn’t exactly heartfelt. So she’s suspended.
Meghan’s suspension rocks the world of her younger sister, Bridget, a social worker. Bridget has always played the free-spirited underachiever to her driven, successful big sister. And she has always adored Evan, who she has known most of her life. So the fact that Meghan’s career appears to be over is not as shocking to Bridget as the fact that Meghan’s marriage appears to be over.
Turns out Evan told Meghan he wanted to separate the night before she swore on air. He told her he was tired of living with a celebrity. He wanted a normal life. Bridget does her best to comfort her sister, but Meghan always has liked to lick her wounds in private. She soon drops out of sight.
In Meghan’s absence, Bridget has to adjust for the first time to life without her sister. She has defined herself as not-Meghan for so long that she is not sure if she is living her life as she wants to or if she has made her choices because she can’t be like Meghan.
Bridget makes very little money. She dropped out of college here and there to take jobs her sister considered odd. Even her choice of boyfriend is off by most New Yorkers’ measures of success. Irving Lefkowitz, deputy police commissioner, could easily be Bridget’s father. Meghan has always thought Bridget could do much better.
But in her own right, Bridget is a pretty tough woman. She works for a nonprofit agency located in the Harriet Tubman housing projects in one of New York’s tougher neighborhoods. She finds beds for women who lose their homes in the middle of the night and leads parenting classes for women who aren’t sure whether hitting their children is a good or a bad idea.
With Meghan as the disappeared screwup and Bridget as the sister holding it together back home, both re-evaluate their relationship with each other, their definitions of success and their lives so far.
Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, knows a thing or two about celebrity and being a New York journalist. Her knowledge of the city comes through in “Rise and Shine.”
But this isn’t a book about being a journalist or a celebrity so much as it is about being the sister of one. Or being a sister, period. While neither Meghan nor Bridget is all that likable, both are vivid and likely to stay with the reader for a long, long time.
Janna Fischer can be reached at 303-954-1270 or at jfischer@denverpost.com.
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Rise and Shine
By Anna Quindlen
Random House, 288 pages, $24.95
