Autobiography of Us

A Novel

By: Aria Beth Sloss

Narrated by: Käthe Mazur

Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

A gripping debut novel about friendship, loss, and love - a confession of what passed between two women who met as girls.

Coming of age in the patrician neighborhood of Pasadena, California, during the 1960s, Rebecca Madden and her beautiful, reckless friend Alex dream of lives beyond their mothers’ narrow expectations. Their struggle to define themselves against the backdrop of an American cultural revolution unites them early on, until one sweltering evening the summer before their last year of college, when a single act of betrayal changes everything. Decades later, Rebecca’s haunting meditation on the past reveals the truth about that night, the years that followed, and the friendship that shaped her.

Autobiography of Us is an achingly beautiful portrait of a decades-long bond. A rare and powerful glimpse into the lives of two women caught between repression and revolution, it casts new light on the sacrifices, struggles, victories, and defeats of a generation.

©2013 Aria Beth Sloss (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“With surprising ease, the book plays out the friends’ complicated dynamic against a tableau of enormous changes for women, resulting in a potent story of altered expectations and thwarted dreams.… A book that gains momentum with each new choice and crisis...[ Autobiography of Us] blossoms in stirring and surprising ways.” ( New York Times)

“In Autobiography of Us, Sloss captures not only the lives of two passionate and intelligent women but that very particular moment in American history when expectations about women and families were beginning to change - I felt Alex and Rebecca’s pains and pleasures as my own. A beautifully written and utterly captivating novel.” (Margot Livesey, New York Times best-selling author)

"A smooth first-person narrative…. The story’s hopeful end is tempered with the realization that, had the central characters been born a generation later, maybe their lives would have been better." ( Publishers Weekly)