English, Scottish, & Welsh Fiction, Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Humorous Fiction, Occupations - Fiction

What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal

Name: What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal
Author: Zoe Heller
ISBN: 9780641989698

by Zoe Heller, Nadia May (Narrated by), Nadia May (Read by)

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Overview

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Now the Major Motion Picture Notes on a Scandal

Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a solitary life until Sheba Hart, the new art teacher at St. George's, befriends her. But even as their relationship develops, so too does another: Sheba has begun an illicit affair with an underage male student. When the scandal turns into a media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her friend's defense—and ends up revealing not only Sheba's secrets, but also her own.

Second Place Winner, 2003 Discover Award, Fiction

About the Author, Zoe Heller

Zoë Heller was born in London and lives in New York City. Currently a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph, she has contributed to such publications as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Independent, The Sunday Times (London), and The New Republic. She is also the author of the novel Everything You Know.

Biography

Although Zoe Heller made her initial splash with a series of addictively entertaining "girl about town" columns for Britain's Telegraph and Sunday Times, she has made the transition to literary fiction with a degree of success that can only be called extraordinary.

London-born and Oxford-educated, Heller acquired her M.A. from Columbia University in 1988. After graduate school, she returned to England, where she worked briefly in publishing, then as a journalist, book reviewer, and feature writer for various mainstream British newspapers. In the 1990s, she moved to New York and began chronicling her experiences as a single woman in the Big Apple. Her wry, witty, and outrageously confessional dispatches turned her into a household name in Britain and inspired a wave of Bridget Jones-style journalism that has never matched Heller's signature brio and artistic flair.

Despite the popularity of her columns, Heller began to feel confined by the kind of writing that had made her reputation. In 2000, she plunged into the choppy seas of literary fiction with a darkly comic novel entitled Everything You Know. Although it was savaged by the British press (a sour grapes-induced snubbing and drubbing Heller admits still stings), the book received enthusiastic reviews in the U.S. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it ""A sparkling first novel...As affecting as it is amusing," and the Los Angeles Times called it "... a shrewdly funny portrayal of a first-class curmudgeon."

There was nothing mixed about the reception for Heller's sophomore effort. Released in 2003, Notes on a Scandal (incongruously entitled in the U.S. What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal), was an unqualified success. The story of an obsessive affair between a teacher and her underage student, the novel unfolds in the form of a manuscript written by the teacher's "friend," an embittered older colleague with a few obsessions of her own. The book was shortlisted for Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize, and went on to become an acclaimed, award-winning film starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

Following the success of Notes on a Scandal, Heller gave up her award-winning column, admitting that she was somewhat embarrassed by its egregiously autobiographical content. (In 2005, she told the Independent, "[T]he sound of the barrel being scraped became too resounding.") And while devoted fans still miss her wry, sly, self-deprecating articles, there is no question the literary world has gained a formidable talent. In the words of the American writer Edmund White, "Heller joins the front ranks of British novelists, right up there with Amis and McEwan." Lofty praise for a former Bridget Jones!

Good To Know

On her right shoulder, Heller sports a faded tattoo of a small, green tortoise. "I was 17," she explained in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. "On the Finchley Road. And I was with some boys who were getting naked women, the ace of spades and so on. I wasn't going to get a naked lady and it happened at the time that my favourite animal was a tortoise."

Heller's father, Lukas Heller, wrote Hollywood screenplays (including The Dirty Dozen and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), and her mother was involved in politics, including the Save London Transport campaign.

Some fascinating outtakes from our interview with Zoë Heller:

"My very first job was as a milkman's assistant on an electric milk float in London. (This was in the days when British homeowners got their milk delivered to their front doorsteps.) I was 14 at the time. It was an okay job, but the smell of stale milk tended to linger horribly on my clothes."

"I wish I could have been a jazz singer."

"I have two daughters. One is named Frankie Ray (Frankie after the 12-year-old protagonist of The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers; Ray for Ray Charles) The younger one is named Lula Nelson (Lula because we liked it -- and oddly enough it turns out to be the name that Carson McCuller's was given at birth; Nelson for Willie Nelson)."

"I am pathetically without hobbies. I like lying in a hammock with a gin and tonic and a book."

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
More than a decade ago, Kazuo Ishiguro wowed readers with The Remains of the Day, a novel requiring readers to see past the self-deceptions of an uppity English narrator to understand the true significance of the story. In the same vein, Zoë Heller offers a riveting story of friendship, jealousy, and betrayal, with a narrator as unreliable as Ishiguro's infamous butler.

Heller's narrator is Barbara Covett, a British schoolteacher who lives a quiet, solitary life with an aging cat as her sole companion. For reasons she cannot comprehend, Barbara has never been good at making friends. But she is drawn to Sheba, a pretty new pottery teacher, and jealously tries to edge out the other teachers to win Sheba's friendship. When Sheba begins an inappropriate relationship with a young male student, it is Barbara in whom she confides. Soon, Barbara begins a written account of Sheba's illicit affair, detailing the actions of a woman caught in the grip of an obsession larger than herself.

As Barbara continues to infiltrate Sheba's life, their friendship acquires a dangerous undercurrent. And although the book title ostensibly refers to Sheba, readers might ask themselves the same question of Barbara, as this psychologically rich, complex tale unfolds. In penning her wickedly wonderful second novel, Zoë Heller certainly had her head squarely on her shoulders. (Fall 2003 Selection)

The Los Angeles Times

What Was She Thinking? is a tartly readable portrait of terminal neediness, as sharp and merciless as any of Zoë Heller's columns. — Heller McAlpin

The New York Times

In the end, What Was She Thinking? isn't so much about the standard student-teacher affair as it is about the complicated weights and balances of female friendships. Some of the novel's funniest scenes show the women adopting a posture of honesty and ''supportiveness'' while privately judging or dismissing one another. It's a recognizable snit-fit of ''enough about you, what about me'' that pushes Barbara into her final betrayal. In a way, Barbara risks more for friendship than Sheba does for romance. The plot twist may not be a huge surprise, but Heller handles it with wry grace, managing to mock her characters without allowing their story to tip into farce. — Lisa Zeidner

The New Yorker

Barbara Covett, a sixtyish history teacher, is the kind of unmarried-woman-with-cat whose female friends sooner or later decide she is "too intense." Thus when a beautiful new pottery teacher, Sheba Hart -- a "wispy novice with a tinkly accent and see-through skirts" - chooses Barbara as a confidante, she is deeply, even rather sinisterly, gratified. Sheba's secret is explosive: married with two kids, she is having an affair with a fifteen-year-old student. The novel, Heller's second, is Barbara's supposedly objective "history" of the affair and its eventual discovery, written furtively while she and her friend are holed up in a borrowed house, waiting for Sheba's court date. Barbara has appointed herself Sheba's "unofficial guardian," protecting her from the salivating tabloids. Equally adroit at satire and at psychological suspense, Heller charts the course of a predatory friendship and demonstrates the lengths to which some people go for human company.

The Washington Post

In literature as in life, one of the most dangerous turns of events is to get what you want, and for all its surface tawdriness and chatty asides, What Was She Thinking? achieves some worthy literary aims indeed. — Chris Lehmann

Publishers Weekly

Subtitled Notes on a Scandal, Heller's engrossing second novel (after Everything You Know) is actually the story of two inappropriate obsessions-one a consummated affair between a high school teacher and her student, the other a secret passion harbored by a dowdy spinster. Sheba Hart, a new 40ish art teacher at a London school for working-class kids, has been arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, Steven Connolly. The papers are having a blast. Sheba is herself the object of fascination for her older colleague and defender, Barbara Covett, whose interest in Sheba is not overtly romantic but has an erotic-and at times malevolent-intensity. Barbara narrates the story of Sheba's affair while inadvertently revealing her own obsession and her pivotal role in the scandal. The novel is gripping from start to finish; Heller brings vivid, nuanced characterizations to the racy story. Sheba is upper-class, arty, carelessly beautiful in floaty layers of clothing, with a full life of her own: doting older husband, impossible adolescent daughter, a son with Down's Syndrome, real if underdeveloped talent as a potter. She never got a driver's license, she tells Barbara, because she is always given rides; people want to do things for her. Barbara's respectable maiden-lady exterior hides a bitter soul that feasts on others' real and imagined shortcomings: one colleague's carelessly shaved armpits, another's risible baseball jacket. Even characters on stage for a minute (a Camden barman who hams it up for Barbara) live and breathe. Author tour. (Aug.) Forecast: Some readers will pass this up as yet another take on the shopworn theme of student/teacher romance, but Heller's light touch will win over others and please reviewers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Spinster schoolteacher Barbara Covett lives a somewhat lonely life (although that's not how she would describe it). She disdains her fellow teachers at St. George's, and her closest companion is her cat, Portia. When the bohemianly attractive Sheba Hart arrives at school as the new art instructor, Barbara strikes up a friendship with her, thereby becoming the only person who knows that Sheba is having an affair with a young student. But somehow the news is leaked to the school administration, and Sheba becomes the focus of a media avid for scandal. Anxious to protect Sheba and to run interference with her husband and children, Barbara persuades Sheba to move in with her and begins secretly writing a defense of her friend's behavior-the book we're reading-which inadvertently reveals more about Barbara than Sheba. Heller's (Everything You Know) first-person narrator seems totally self-deluded. Or is she? Are Barbara's motives saintly or sinister? This deliciously subtle novel about obsession, love, and (possibly) friendship belongs on most public library fiction shelves. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/03.]-Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

After Everything You Know (2000) comes the tale of a London art teacher, married with children, who has an affair with a student of 15. When Sheba (Bathsheba) Hart comes to St. George's school, she's completely inexperienced-as clueless about disciplining hormone-driven students as she is about how to dress, inclining toward the sheer, diaphanous, and fey when corduroy or tweed would be in order. More expert, however, is experienced faculty member Barbara Covett-40ish, single, lonely-who casts a cool eye on the exotic Sheba, gradually is drawn closer, and ends up an intimate friend: kind of Wuthering Heights's Nelly Dean to Sheba, making notes, keeping a timeline, and writing a narrative (this novel) of the whole debacle of Sheba's affair. Barbara's tale is often stiff and clumsy ("I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment"), but it neatly limns the contrast between Barbara's drab, spinsterish life and Sheba's charming, fecund, expansive domesticity, with her academic husband (though he's a snob), and her two healthy children (the older, though, a fiercely troubled teenager and the younger, doted on by Sheba, a victim of Down's syndrome). There's a major disconnect between all of this on the one hand and, on the other, Sheba's letting herself be seduced by the callow working-class Steven Connolly, then continuing the affair for months, keeping it a secret even from Barbara, until inevitable exposure and with it the promise of loss, penalty, breakup, dislocation, perhaps even imprisonment, though the story (wisely) ends with this last yet to come, leaving us only with a powerful sense of the piercing loneliness of Barbara of the inexplicablyself-invited ruin of the charming and yet utterly lost Sheba-her family ruined, her future depraved. Unbelievable yet compelling: it's almost as if Heller tried for a salacious potboiler and ended up-her talent refusing not to intrude-with a portrait that remains indelible. Watch for her next, whatever it may be. Author tour