Book Report: Desperately Seeking Susan by Susan Dworkin (1985)

I bought this book at a garage sale in my old eBay days. When cleaning out the backstock of those old books, I decided to add it to my personal library since I’ve never seen the movie, but I was kind of familiar with the plot. So I read it.

What do you want? It’s the novelization of a romantic comedy about Baby Boomers being New Wave in the middle 1980s. Man, they actually used to novelize those things. Now, that tradition is only upheld for books that geeks and fanboys will buy.

Roberta, an aging (26!) and disenchanted suburban housewife, lives vicariously through the personal ads, particularly a series of ads wherein a man desperately seeks Susan. When she follows the directions to one of Susan’s rendezvous, Roberta becomes more immersed in Susan’s life than in her own.

I took two things away from this book:

  • If Madonna had been born 20 years later, she would have been one of the first stars with a sex tape accidentally leaked to the Internet.
  • I find it unintentionally amusing when I read books where characters in their mid twenties think they’re old. You don’t really get old until your middle thirties, anyone in his or her middle thirties will tell you.

Now I’ll have to get the commemorative twentieth anniversary two-DVD retrospective that’s due any day now.

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