How to Hold a Woman
available for purchase on Amazon.com
a novel in stories
by BILLY LOMBARDO
ISBN-13: 978-0-9767177-5-1
166 pages, paper, $16.95
Publication date: June 16, 2009
Gina Frangello, Executive Editor
OV Books Chicago
773-398-4152, gfrangello@yahoo.com
Stacy Bierlein, Executive Editor
OV Books Los Angeles
310-721-0418, SBwriting@aol.com
Published by OV Books - Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
Alan and Audrey are an ordinary married couple raising three children when the unthinkable happens: their eldest daughter, Isobel, on the verge of precocious womanhood, goes missing in the middle of the night. When Isobel's body is found, Alan, Audrey and their two young sons are left to decipher the mysteries of how to go on living—and loving—in the aftermath of such violence and loss. A hauntingly intimate portrait of grief, HOW TO HOLD A WOMAN is also about the bonds of brotherhood, the redemptive power of erotic love, and will appeal to male readers as well as female readers. Billy Lombardo has the potential to be ground- breaking in his raw, honest portrayal of a just-barely-functioning family.
"Mourning is something we each handle in our own way, as there's no manual, no recipe for dealing with the aftermath of death. It's not until we find ourselves in the midst of the mixed ingredients our hearts and mind combine, which often require equal parts heartache and denial paired with some irrational emotion and devastation before we can face the fleshy thing that beats inside of us as broken or irreparable.
Billy Lombardo's debut, How To Hold A Woman is a novel told in connected stories, linked together by grief, dysfunction, and raw human emotion. The one constant within the nine chapters that chronicle the lives of a suburban family is the lack of syrup-laden drama that keeps the fulcrum of the story ever-present. We are introduced to these fictitious people and their lives in a way that makes you forget you're reading fiction and rather becoming a voyeur of sorts. The author lets us peer into kitchen conversations, quiet tragedies, and emotional outbursts in each chapter, but everyone remains flawed and no one is viewed through a corrective lense or microscope." Read more
—Angela Stubbs, PopMatters
"In How to Hold a Woman, Lombardo again creates young characters, brothers Dex and Sammy and sister Isabel, of shimmering emotional complexity as he focuses on a marriage under pressure and the wrenching loss and grief attendant on the death of a child and a parent's affliction with Alzheimer's. Most novelists require several hundred pages to grapple with these themes, but Lombardo has honed his gifts for concision, ellipses, revealing dialogue, and poignant misdirection, thus embracing a world of hurt and healing with poetic compression. The spontaneous camaraderie among riders on a city bus, the rituals and running jokes that unite a household, the echoes of personal tragedy in random incidents of street mayhem––all snap into place as Lombardo traces a family's painful reconfiguration. A bittersweet tale of brotherhood, a sexy portrayal of embattled married love, this is a sequence of linked stories to read once ravenously, then again to fully appreciate all the nuances of feeling and perception."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
"How to Hold a Woman is a wonderful novel. Billy Lombardo writes with a fierce honesty; gracefully
guiding the reader through the tenacious connections that bind us to the people we love. A luminous
and heartbreaking book."
—David Haynes, author of The Full Matilda
"Billy Lombardo's How to Hold a Woman is one of the wisest books about loss and the numbness
of grief I've ever read. A family faces the unbearable, and as readers we're taken to the edge of the
abyss, surveying the emotional fallout. A smart and moving account of how people cope with every
parent's nightmare, Lombardo's achievement is in arranging his narrative around the new unspeakable
hole in the center of their lives, and deftly takes us through the heart-wrenching, heart-healing
aftermath as the family stumbles past their bewilderment and grief to what lies beyond."
—CJ Hribal, author of The Company Car and The Clouds in Memphis
"Billy Lombardo's How to Hold a Woman is these things: exquisitely written, real, painful, and true.
His talent for depicting the nuances of marriage and family is extraordinary; reading this, one feels
as though Alan, Audrey and the boys are your close friends, about whom you somehow know a little
more than you should. His ear for dialogue is spot-on, and his understanding of the human heart
is profound. This is simply a lovely, heartbreaking book."
—Elizabeth Crane, author of You Must Be This Happy to Enter and When the Messenger Is Hot
In How to Hold a Woman: A Novel in Stories, Forest Park writer Billy Lombardo just about breaks my heart.
The novel begins with a young family welcoming home the dad, Alan, who has spent the summer as a research scientist in Madagascar. They celebrate by having dinner at Khyber Pass in Oak Park. Alan learns that his 12-year-old daughter Isabel has been reading The Great Gatsby for humanities and has become enchanted with Daisy. She has memorized a passage from the book to share with her dad.
As Isabel settles into a silence, it's as though something is taking place under her skin. "Isabel becomes someone else at the booth at Kyber Pass," writes Lombardo. "Daisy Buchanan's words spring from her as though they have been bubbling in her throat for days, and in her eyes it seems that Alan has become Nick Carraway."
Read more
—Deborah Dowley Preiser, PioneerLocal