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New and improved -- now with added goats!
Welcome to advertising executive Jill Campbell's life, version 2.0. Gone are the cheating ex-husband and the chaos of New York. Brand-new features include a prestigious job at a Boston ad agency, a stronger father-daughter relationship, and a gorgeous old farmhouse. It's bliss -- until a snazzy car account evaporates, leaving her branding...beef. Un-snazzy, un-sexy beef -- which she hasn't eaten in twenty years. Talk about false advertising. Owning a two-hundred-year-old house in a one-store hamlet is not the nirvana Jill imagined, even with the addition of a dog, two needy goats, and unexpected encounters with the town's most eligible -- and probably only -- bachelor.
Peace of mind sold separately.
Wondering how she sold herself on this new existence, Jill forms an unlikely bond with Sarah Watson, a feisty twelve-year-old with an aversion to training bras, makeup, and all the trappings that supposedly make sixth grade worthwhile. While Sarah teaches Jill the basics of home maintenance and animal husbandry, Jill helps Sarah deal with impending womanhood. And as men start to complicate matters, every idea Jill ever had about love and advertising gets turned on its head. Suddenly, her life looks nothing like the picture on the box, but it could turn out to be exactly what she didn't know she needed.
- Sales Rank: #7248408 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Pocket Books
- Published on: 2007-01-09
- Released on: 2007-01-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.00" w x 5.31" l, .70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
About the Author
Tracy McArdle works in marketing and is also the author of Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa, available from Downtown Press. She graduated from Fordham University and the Sorbonne in Paris, and spent twelve years working in the entertainment industry in New York and Los Angeles before moving home to New England in 2003. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe and Premiere magazine. She lives with her husband, two horses, a dog, and her cat, Little, in Carlisle, Massachusetts, the home of Fern's Country Store.
For more about Tracy, check out www.tracymcardle.net.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Circle Back
If happiness struck, suddenly and uninvited, would you recognize it? Would you scare it off with cynicism and denial, or let it tag along like an old friend, confident in its rightness? You'd be surprised how many people fuck it up. You can miss it just by hating traffic or obsessing over stupid people at work. Like an honest lover you've repeatedly failed, eventually it wanders off, seeking validation somewhere else.
Jill Campbell. As Jill scribbled her new, old name for the billionth time, sealing the last of her divorce vows, she wondered if she and Ben had ever been happy. She must have thought they were, at some point -- on their wedding day, certainly, but that was so long ago and such a blur she couldn't remember feeling anything except anxiety over how bad the DJ was when he slipped into Kool & the Gang's "Celebration." Finally they realized he had the wrong playlist, and Jill had laughed about it, eventually. They had laughed a lot in the beginning. So much had happened since then. New York social life. Jobs. Age had happened, had snuck up on them and planted differences between them, forcing their common paths to widen slowly apart like separating subway tracks. We are different people now, she thought, remembering how young they were, how free, how...self-absorbed. It was okay back then, to be self-absorbed. People expected it when you were twenty-something and ambitious, with a lot to prove.
They had grown apart. There was that, and there was the fact that Ben had successfully seduced a twenty-five-year-old account executive on the Best Deodorant account after a lovely afternoon of harmless canoeing. He was sorry, but now he suddenly wanted children. Maybe that's what happens after you sleep with one, Jill thought bitterly.
"Miz Campbell -- er, Jillian?" Ben's attorney, a rigid, menopausal red-haired creature named Eleanor, had caught her drifting off. She had black eyes and a beak for a nose, although something about her was more reptilian than fowl.
"It's Jill," Jill insisted again, clearing her throat and pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth, a habit built by years of stress and fatigue and worrying about other women. Today she was changing everything -- her marital status, city, job, and goddamn it, a name that never felt right. Jillian Campbell-Marks was now Jill Campbell again, at last. Lew Donaldson, Jill's round, kind, and wrinkly lawyer, was gnawing the end of a plastic Paper Mate pen, willing her to complete the process without emotional complications. He'd taken too many divorces this far and then not reached the finish when the weepy wife wouldn't go through with it. But Jill noticed it was Ben who was sniffling, not her. She smiled discreetly at Lew -- this had been Hell Week for him -- divorce papers, a new contract with a new agency and getting out of the old one, signed all in the same day -- and she was grateful.
"Sorry, just rereading," Jill lied to Eleanor, continuing to sign. Jill Campbell, Jill Campbell, Jill Campbell. Her name felt half-dressed without its old hyphenated-Marks at the end, but she liked writing it, like a teenage girl who practices writing her name coupled with the last name of the boy she has a crush on. And the more she wrote it the better she felt. He gets the apartment and the agency job and the fish; I get the cool new job and new life and my old city, she thought to herself, staring neutrally at her ex-husband, this mediocre slab of a man who had yanked the proverbial rug from under her comfortable, expensively pedicured feet. At least her own money had bought the pedicures. She shivered at the thought of a careerless woman suffering the humiliation of an affair and divorce. How hideous to endure the shame of being not only unwanted but also useless -- nowhere to apply yourself every day but the yoga studio. Her career may not have taken the path she'd wanted, not exactly anyway, but it was a solid foundation of security upon which she could now rebuild her life.
Let him have the twenty-five-year-old canoe paddler. Named Kale, for God's sake. I mean, honestly, who names their child after greens? Let Kale keep up with his moods, his primatelike body hair, his manic exercising, and his obsession with the Yankees' shortstop and the latest consumer segments for "upscale deodorant." Let them paddle off into the sunset of the Harlem River. Hell, Jill would buy them two oars for Christmas, from L.L. Bean, to show there were really no hard feelings. There were no feelings at all, in fact. She was just fine, thank you. There had been that one brief display of childish behavior when Jill took a cab to Hoboken at midnight and smeared Kale's Honda, hood to trunk, with Best Solid Stick in Woodsy Pine scent. Jill still hadn't admitted to anyone how shockingly fulfilling that had felt.
Ben shifted in the fat leather chair, clearly uncomfortable. He hadn't shaved and looked as though he hadn't slept. Jill noticed his familiar left eye tic -- a clear sign he was stressed -- and stared at his pink tie, the one they'd picked out together before the Best Deodrant pitch two years ago -- was he wearing it on purpose? He was still handsome, thick brown hair, hazel eyes, sharp nose, solid rugby build, but clearly older. Six years, and Jill would probably never see him with his shirt off ever again. Maybe she would meet a man who wasn't so hairy, she thought selfishly, and then Eleanor put a hand on Ben's back protectively, as if sensing her shallow thoughts. Jill must have snorted mildly, for Eleanor suddenly made a big gesture of wiping off her jacket cuff and staring into Jill's forehead. A communications major and creative advertising executive who'd spent the last ten years studying consumer psychographic profiles and sitting through hundreds of focus groups, Jill knew this meant Eleanor didn't have the guts to look her in the eye. She quickly and silently hoped all childless women didn't turn out like Eleanor. Then again, Eleanor was probably very rich. And it was likely the only underwear she ever had to pick up off the floor was her own.
No wedding finger on that claw, Jill noticed, staring at Eleanor's fingers. How could women attorneys represent men in divorces? Jill wondered what percentage of divorces was the man's fault. How many twenty-five-year-old account managers were there in those stats?
If Ben's lawyer looked like an aging, irritable dragon, well, Lew looked like W. C. Fields as a fattened, friendly groundhog. Short, round, scrubby, and sincere. He was an old friend of Jill's grandfather, and she knew anyone trying to take advantage of her in a negotiation didn't stand a chance.
"When do you leave?" Ben suddenly asked in his honest, gentle voice. Damn him. He knew that voice disarmed her. Like the sound of soft gravel under slow tires. She was not going to weaken. She wanted this. It was a good thing. She didn't need him. He was now part of her past, the fucking asshole. Onward.
"Two-thirty shuttle," Jill answered neutrally, tucking a lock of caramel blond hair behind her ear, newly outfitted with diamond earrings that had been purchased with the haul from selling her wedding rings. The earrings were spectacular, Jill knew, imagining how they were catching the light in this glum office as she looked Ben directly in the eye. Oldest trick in the book, she thought, as he glanced quickly away, unprepared for the naked gesture.
She liked having an appointment or a plane to catch at two-thirty. It was the longest, most empty time of the day if you were suffering. Not morning, not evening, not even the promise of evening...the day's ugly midsection, its midlife crisis, she'd always thought, and run from it. An existential promise of doom, daily, if you didn't plan ahead. Meetings, manicures, conference calls, or matinees. You had to kill two-thirty every damn day, before it killed you.
"Boston's cold now," Ben tried, and Lew began busily packing up Jill's papers. Eleanor mimed him, shuffling Ben's folders and checking her watch. "Dress warm...," Ben added awkwardly, studying the carpet.
"Warmly," she corrected out of habit. He smiled. "Duh," Jill said, ceding the moment, choosing to pity instead of need him. He sighed with relief and then gushed, "Jills...When you feel ready, I, I'd like to...keep in touch. If it's not -- too weird." His eyes were gaping holes of confusion. Men always realize things late. As in months or years late. Time, Jill suddenly realized with a shrieking clarity, is different for them, like it is for animals. Still, it took courage to say that, she thought.
Jill wondered briefly if Ben had the happy drugs. Zoloft, Prozac, even Xanax...throughout the last six months her therapist had practically begged her to take them all, but she'd insisted on quitting her job, marriage, and city without the help of Big Pharma. The divorce papers and exit contracts had been initiated months ago and survived endless negotiations. The last few months in the Upper East Side studio had been strangely soothing; she'd busied herself with headhunter conference calls and the real estate section of the Boston Globe. "Consulting" for Shine had been a joke. She'd drafted a couple designs, written a few brand positioning briefs, and used the rest of the time to milk every contact she had (there were hundreds of them) for Boston agency leads. Today was D-day, signing every aspect of her life into the past in one afternoon.
Like skydiving, she thought, there was really no point in doing it halfway. Dr. Springer had been right -- boy had it sucked. Especially at two-thirty. She couldn't remember feeling so empty, hollow, or helpless since the death of her mother thirty years ago. She hated pretending to be in control, hated pretending to hate him when what she'd wanted all along was to be understood. Now so much had happened she almost didn't care. Hate was big enough to keep the other emotions out of the way.
Almost. She'd been trying to see the glory in starting over. With a new beginning, perhaps she coul...
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Hilarious, insightful and riveting
By Wendy Wilson
What a great read! I admire the courage of the main character, Jill Campbell. She's a talented and gutsy woman who's not willing to put up with BS and not afraid to make real change in her life, even if it means being on her own. Real Women Eat Beef is a riveting story of how a 30-something advertising executive sheds her cheating husband and struggles to redefine her life and her career in a less-than-honorable advertising agency. Along the way, a 12-year old girl, a couple of goats, and a slew of unlikely, yet memorable, characters from her new small-town community help her discover a life with deeper meaning and make career choices that even Jill's grandfather would find honorable. Hilarious and insightful, RWEB is a cut above the typical chick lit novel.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Tracy McArdle captivated me from the beginning of this charming coming-of-middle-age story.
By C. Dionne
Advertising executive Jillian Campbell is going through some major life changes. She's divorced her cheating husband and traded in the fast-paced New York lifestyle for a farmhouse in Holton, Massachusetts. She's also taken on a new and exciting job with the Boston ad agency, Wiseman Connor. Jillian thinks that she has her life on track and everything she wants or needs is right at her fingertips but her `new life' just may involve a few surprises which will have her reevaluating her priorities.
Jillian fell in love with the old farmhouse the moment she saw it online. Obtaining it is the only thing that seems to be going according to plan though. The house needs some work and she doesn't have time to do it herself. Her father's getting remarried and Jillian doesn't like his fiancé. Her grandfather is suddenly having less and less moments of lucid thought and his temperment resembles a petulant child. The cushy car account she was promised when she signed on with Wiseman Connor mysteriously disappears and she's stuck having to come up with a catchy slogan for a beef account - she doesn't even eat beef. Just to make things more interesting throw in a couple of goats, a dog, several unexpected encounters with a local man whom she's very attracted to, and a twelve-year-old local entrepreneur with an aversion to all the trappings that would make her `feminine.'
Sarah Watson abhors everything about her changing body. She has no interest in any of the `girly' things that her so enamor her peers. She'd much rather be outside taking care of animals or taking care of the needs of the locals through her business `Sarah What Not.' When she meets Jillian and begins caring for her animals, Sarah is immediately drawn to her. Jillian represents everything that Sarah someday hopes to be. She soon realizes that Jillian's life isn't all roses and sunshine either and they form a special bond. Jillian helps Sarah clear the hurdles of impending womanhood, and Sarah teaches Jillian about animal husbandry. They learn that life is full of unexpected occurrences and sometimes you have to go with your instincts and hope your heart doesn't get crushed in the end.
Tracy McArdle captivated me from the beginning of this charming coming-of-middle-age story. She's lived such a focused life for so long that it's difficult to change pace and enjoy the new life she could have for herself. There are plenty of scenes that will steal your breath, some that will make you smile, and others that will bring tears to your eyes. I was especially touched by Jillian and Sarah's friendship and how easily they could relate to each other. The scenes with Jillian's grandfather struck an emotional chord with me, it's so difficult witnessing an ailing relative and knowing there is nothing you can do to help. The focus of this story is primarily on Jillian's gradual acceptance of who she is and what she feels is important in her life. The reader will notice glimpses of a potential romance throughout the book but nothing really obvious. We are treated to some seriously cool scenes when Jillian puts her job on the line and takes a stand for what she believes in which instilled a real sense of pride for the woman she's become.
Chrissy Dionne (courtesy of Romance Junkies)
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
It's not awful, but it's certainly no star.
By K. Hinton
Manhattan advertising executive Jillian Campbell-Marks has been through a rough few months. After discovering that her husband cheated on her with a junior account manager, she leaves him, their beautiful apartment, and her wonderful job at Shine, the agency where they both worked. While divorce proceedings begin, Jill reclaims her former self--the woman she was before she let New York life, marriage, and her high-powered career take over. She decides to move back to her hometown of Boston and to take a position at the second best advertising firm there as senior creative director of branding. Jillian decides that she'll go back to being Jill Marks, the girl she was before she let everything go to her head. Buying a huge farm house in rural Holton, Mass., Jill plans to get back to basics--including owning farm animals, decorating her home, and jumping into her new job and her new account with a Swedish convertible company. The fact that she's a single woman in a town of mostly families doesn't dissuade her, regardless of the fact that she hates the very idea of children which was one of the deal breakers in her marriage.
What Jill doesn't expect is that the New York rat race is not the only place where life moves too fast. Just as soon as she arrives at her new job, Jill is thrown for a loop with all of the tasks that she's given--many of which were not in her original job description. In fact, instead of working on a zippy Swedish convertible, her first job is to rebrand a major producer of beef--no small feat for a woman who doesn't eat red meat. Overwhelmed with work, she hires a 13-year-old Holton girl to look after her farm and her animals and to help her with everyday tasks. Though the last thing she wants is children of her own, Jill finds herself inexplicably drawn to Sarah, proprietess of Sarah's What Not an odds-and-ends helper service, and they strike up a friendship that defies meaning. Sarah, similarly, looks up to this mid-thirties New Yorker who is trying to make a life for herself in the small town of Holton. Their subplot is one of the best things this book has to offer.
That being said, this story was lacking in its main storyline... for the most part because of how difficult it was to like Jill. When faced with a main character who is resentful of everyone (her father's new girlfriend, her best friend who appears to have a perfect life complete with husband and children, her ex-husband's younger and more fertile girlfriend), it's difficult to find a reason to care about her. It seems that the things she resents about everyone else are the things she claims she doesn't want for her own life, or does she. It's too difficult to care about a woman who can't seem to make up her mind, but will call everyone else on their inadequacies the very moment they are expressed, yet can't seem to take the same criticism. Case in point: at one point Jill's father's new girlfriend says she didn't realize the Swedish made convertibles. To which Jill replies, have you never heard of Saab? Jill neglects to realize, however, that Saab is a GM company and a Swedish name does not a Swedish car make.
Besides Jill, the rest of the book is enjoyable, though many of the subplots rush to fruition in the last twenty pages of the book. There's so much buildup with the stories surrounding Jill's two Holton crushes--the man who delivers her grain and the man who plows her driveway, but one of them is just suddenly dropped in favor of the other. A reason is given by the author, but it was a bit too easy for this reviewer to accept. Likewise, the subplot involving Jill's grandfather and his past difficulties with the agriculture industry just comes rushing out in the last ten or so chapters. It's hinted at throughout the book, but the author rushes it to completion at the end.
As a whole, Real Women Eat Beef isn't awful, but it's certainly no star. Jill's "no children and career first" attitude is very similar to the main character in Emily Giffin's Baby Proof. For a story with a similar plot that has a bit more substance, I'd check that one out. Otherwise, Real Women Eat Beef is fine if you're in the mood for chick lit, it just takes itself a bit too seriously for this reader.
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