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A brilliantly original novel of the 1970s counterculture
Alice Duncan is an eleven-year-old girl who looks so much like a grown woman, she attracts the attention of adult men. Abandoned by her mother and neglected by her father who has checked himself into a mental asylum, Alice and her sixteen year old Aunt Esme live on their own in an Upper East Side townhouse, entertaining teenage boys, shoplifting at department stores, and dining on cookies and pizza-until Esme decides to fly off to L.A. with a singer in a punk rock band. Alice, left to her own devices, travels by bus to North Carolina to attend the Balthus Institute, a shadowy art school for gifted children. While Alice is being groomed to become an artist, she meets a wheelchair bound photographer of broken dolls, a queenly French surrealist sculptor, a pair of twins who are child prodigies, and a charming, sinister character known only as "J.D." A hedonistic drug dealer who is equal parts criminal and prankster, J.D. slowly inducts Alice into an outlaw counterculture. They form a dangerous friendship.
Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, One Pill Makes You Smaller is the story of a young girl forced to navigate a bewildering adult world where morality is turned upside down. Set in the permissive seventies and suffused with the atmosphere of that reckless time, the novel portrays a young girl's unwilling tumble toward adulthood and exposes the darker corners of America's past.
Alice Duncan is an eleven-year-old girl who looks so much like a grown woman, she attracts the attention of adult men. Abandoned by her mother and neglected by her father who has checked himself into a mental asylum, Alice and her sixteen year old Aunt Esme live on their own in an Upper East Side townhouse, entertaining teenage boys, shoplifting at department stores, and dining on cookies and pizza-until Esme decides to fly off to L.A. with a singer in a punk rock band. Alice, left to her own devices, travels by bus to North Carolina to attend the Balthus Institute, a shadowy art school for gifted children. While Alice is being groomed to become an artist, she meets a wheelchair bound photographer of broken dolls, a queenly French surrealist sculptor, a pair of twins who are child prodigies, and a charming, sinister character known only as "J.D." A hedonistic drug dealer who is equal parts criminal and prankster, J.D. slowly inducts Alice into an outlaw counterculture. They form a dangerous friendship.
Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, One Pill Makes You Smaller is the story of a young girl forced to navigate a bewildering adult world where morality is turned upside down. Set in the permissive seventies and suffused with the atmosphere of that reckless time, the novel portrays a young girl's unwilling tumble toward adulthood and exposes the darker corners of America's past.
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Reviews
"Lisa Dierbeck's wildly original vision is a miraculous fusion of dizzy confabulation and all too real grit and danger. Her sharp, vulnerable Alice is one of the most delightfully surprising heroines I've met in contemporary fiction. The deepest pleasures of One Pill Makes You Smaller come from love and language, from the thrill of discovery, from Ms. Dierbeck's passion for her people as she leads
Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweet Hearts
"What a strange and extraordinary journey through a looking glass darkly is Lisa Dierbeck's novel. By turns terrifying, funny, sinister, and it must be sheepishly admitted, titillating, Dierbeck has a photograper's eye for detail and a poet's heart for language. Read this book."
David Rakoff, author of Fraud
"Written in exuberant, gorgeous, and propulsive prose, Lisa Dierbeck's novel is impossible to put down. Her characters leap off the page with raw, anarchic chemistry; her dialogue crackles with electricity. Alice's odyssey through a dark wilderness of the soul becomes a celebration of art, our flawed humanity, and life."
Lauren Slater, author of Prozac Diary