Good in Bed

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The column everyone at work has read
2. Her mother, her father, and Bruce's parents
3. Work, Samantha, Nifkin, and the eating clinic
4. The funeral and the test she did not expect
5. Maxi Rider and a strange Hollywood break
6. The airport, Joy, and learning how to stay
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up Good in Bed because I wanted something funny about Philadelphia and I kept seeing Jennifer Weiner shelved next to Helen Fielding. I expected a Bridget Jones copy with cheesesteaks. What I got was sadder and kinder than that, and a lot more interested in families than in dating. First published in 2001 by Pocket Books, it follows Candace Shapiro, called Cannie, who is twenty eight, Jewish, plus size, a Princeton graduate, and a pop culture reporter for the Philadelphia Examiner. She loves her dog and her friends and she is still furious at her father. Then her ex boyfriend writes about their sex life in a national magazine.

Short version: Cannie finds out she is C. in a column about loving a larger woman, gets pregnant by the same ex, loses a lot, and has to build a different life around her daughter.

That sounds tidy. The book is not tidy. It wanders through funerals and weigh ins and Hollywood parties and hospital corridors. Some parts annoyed me. Most parts kept me reading past midnight.

The column everyone at work has read

Cannie starts in a decent place, or what looks like one. She has an affordable apartment in Philadelphia. She covers movies and famous people for the Examiner, which pays the rent and gets her free lunches. She lives with Nifkin, her rat terrier, who sleeps on her feet and judges her snacks. Her best friend Samantha calls all the time and tells the truth even when it stings.

She broke up with Bruce Guberman about three months earlier. Or she thought they were taking a break. Bruce is a grad student type, funny in a slouchy way, pot smoking, sweet to his parents, vague about everything else. Cannie suggested space. Bruce heard goodbye.

Then Bruce gets a job writing a column called Good in Bed for a magazine called Moxie. His first piece is called Loving a Larger Woman. The woman is only called C. Cannie reads it at work and knows right away it is her. He writes about what it is like to sleep with a bigger woman, as if he is brave for doing it. People at the office read it. Friends read it. Her brother and sister read it.

Weiner nails that specific shame. It is not only that an ex told secrets. It is that he turned her body into a topic for strangers while acting tender about it. Cannie does not handle it well at first. She drinks too much tequila. She cries in front of Samantha. Then she goes to see Bruce and yells at him and throws things, including a box of tampons she happens to have in her bag. It is messy and embarrassing and I believed every second of it.

Afterward she second guesses herself. Bruce did say he loved her, in his way. Maybe she overreacted. She calls. He is distant. He says it is really over. That coldness hurts more than the column.

I liked this opening because Cannie is funny without sounding like a stand up act. She makes jokes when she is scared. She also says mean things she has to take back. One small complaint: the office scenes date the book a little. Magazines mattered more then. Gossip moved slower. But the feeling of being exposed in public has only gotten worse since, so it still lands.

Her mother, her father, and Bruce's parents

You cannot talk about this book without talking about parents. Cannie is the oldest of three. Her father left when she was twelve to be with a much younger woman, came back for two days, then left for good when Cannie was eighteen. He is a psychiatrist, hypercritical, the kind of man who told Cannie she was fat when she was still a kid and kept commenting after. He pushed her to go to Princeton and tied tuition money to it, so she went even though it was not her first choice. Now he is remarried with two younger kids and mostly absent.

That history sits inside all of her dating. She watches for signs a man is embarrassed by her. She hears her father's voice when she looks in a mirror. Weiner does not explain this in a neat speech. It comes out in flashes. A memory of being weighed. A memory of trying to be invisible as a teenager. A phone call she does not make.

Her mother went the other direction. After years as a wife, she has come out and is living with Tanya, a plain spoken woman with a gravel voice who owns a big loom and smokes and clearly wishes Cannie and her siblings would visit less. Cannie's mother is loving and nosy and still capable of driving Cannie crazy in one phone call. Her younger siblings are Josh and Lucy. Lucy in particular is struggling, drifting through phone sex work and stripping and bad boyfriends, wanting attention and hating how she asks for it.

Against that, Bruce's family looked perfect to Cannie. His father Bernard was a dermatologist, warm, funny, the dad who remembered details and liked having his kid around. His mother Audrey is the type Cannie calls Ever Tasteful in her head, manicured and polished, house full of white carpet, always volunteering for something at synagogue. Cannie loved being folded into that house. She liked being Jewish with them in an easy way, liked that Bernard was kind to her without making it a point.

So when Bernard dies suddenly, Cannie feels it twice. She grieves a man who was good to her. She also knows funerals pull exes back into orbit.

Fair criticism here: there are a lot of relatives to track, and some get short shrift. Josh barely registers. Lucy gets painful scenes but then fades. Tanya can feel like a punchline at first, all cigarettes and sighs. I wished Weiner had given Tanya one soft scene earlier instead of keeping her at arm's length for so long. Still, the mother daughter fights rang true to me. They argue about food and men and who called whom last, and then her mom shows up when it counts.

Work, Samantha, Nifkin, and the eating clinic

Day to day, Cannie works. She interviews starlets and writes roundups and tries to sound breezy when she is bored. She has a screenplay she wrote on the side, a romantic comedy she hopes someone will actually read. She goes to writing meetings. She takes notes. She wonders if she is wasting her talent on red carpet quotes.

Samantha is the friend everyone wants. She is blunt, loyal, funny, the person who will come over with soup and tell Cannie her roots are showing. Their phone calls carry a lot of the book. They talk about work and weight and whether to call Bruce back. Samantha does not coddle her. When Cannie spirals, Samantha names it.

Nifkin deserves his own paragraph. He is small, wheezy, devoted. He sleeps curled against Cannie. He needs walks when Cannie wants to stay in bed. Pets in novels can feel like props. Nifkin feels like routine, which is the point. He forces her outside. He waits by the door when she cries. I am a sucker for a dog who is just a dog.

Trying to get some control back, Cannie joins the weight and eating disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania. She wants a plan. She wants someone to tell her what to eat. The director is Dr. Krushelevansky, whom she shortens to Dr. K in her head. He is kind and careful. He asks about history as well as food. Cannie likes him right away because he does not flinch and does not lecture.

This middle stretch has weigh ins and waiting rooms and forms. It could have been dull. For me it worked because Cannie is so alert to how clinics can make you feel like a problem to solve. She wants help and resents needing it. She compares herself to thinner women in the waiting room and hates herself for doing it. I recognized that loop.

One thing I appreciated: Weiner lets Cannie be good at her job even while her private life falls apart. She still files copy. She still asks sharp questions. Too many novels make the heroine collapse at work to prove she is sad. Cannie keeps showing up.

The funeral and the test she did not expect

Bernard Guberman's funeral changes everything. Cannie goes to pay respects and maybe to fix things with Bruce. She is nervous about Audrey, nervous about seeing Bruce with his family, nervous about crying in public. After, Bruce leans on her. They talk. They end up sleeping together. For a night Cannie lets herself hope this means they are finding their way back.

Then Bruce pulls away again. He says he is seeing someone else. He stops returning her tentative calls. Cannie feels used and foolish, and also angry at herself for hoping.

Around the same time she has a follow up at the Penn program. Dr. K tells her she cannot join the new trial. At first she thinks she failed screening. Then he tells her the reason is that she is pregnant. From that night after the funeral.

Cannie sits with that news for a long time. She thinks about abortion. She thinks about telling Bruce. She thinks about money and work and her apartment and whether she wants to be a mother now. She is twenty eight and single and her life already feels crowded. She also starts to feel attached to the baby in a way that surprises her.

She writes Bruce a letter. She keeps it short. She says she is pregnant, it happened that night, and if he wants to be part of this they should talk. He never answers. That silence is an answer. Cannie decides to keep the baby and raise it on her own.

I thought Weiner handled this part with care. Cannie does not turn into a saint. She worries about her body changing. She worries she will be a bad mom because her own family was such a mess. She leans on Samantha and her mom and even Dr. K, who starts to feel less like a doctor and more like a friend. She keeps working. She keeps walking Nifkin. Slowly she gets a little happier, not in a glowing way, more like someone remembering how to eat lunch without guilt.

Maxi Rider and a strange Hollywood break

Just when Cannie is adjusting, work hands her a gift. She goes to New York to interview Maxi Rider, a famous actress with a sharp tongue and a tired heart. Cannie expects a puff piece. Maxi expects a snippy reporter. They end up liking each other. Maxi is funny about fame and blunt about men and oddly gentle when Cannie talks about the pregnancy.

On impulse Cannie gives Maxi her screenplay. Maxi actually reads it. Then Maxi says producers want to make it and Cannie needs to come to Los Angeles to work on it.

Hollywood is bright and strange after Philadelphia winter. Cannie stays at Maxi's house. She goes to parties where everyone is beautiful and hungry. She meets her celebrity crush and manages not to embarrass herself too badly. She sits in meetings where men explain her own script back to her. She rewrites scenes by a pool. For a minute she imagines moving west, starting over where no one knows about the column.

She decides against it. Philadelphia is home, with Samantha and Nifkin and her mom, even if home is complicated. I liked that choice. It would have been easy to let Hollywood fix her. Instead Hollywood is just a job, a good one, with room service and jet lag.

If I am being honest, this section is the least believable. A star reading an entertainment reporter's script and getting it produced that fast feels rushed. Maxi is lovely company, though. Their friendship gives Cannie a different mirror than Samantha. Samantha tells hard truths. Maxi tells show business truths, which turn out to be useful too. And the scenes of Cannie pregnant in Los Angeles, trying to find clothes that fit and food that stays down while assistants offer her green juice, made me laugh out loud.

The airport, Joy, and learning how to stay

The turn back to Philadelphia is brutal. In the airport after her flight, Cannie spots Bruce with a young woman she takes to be his new girlfriend. Words get exchanged. Cannie is rude. The woman follows her into the restroom. They argue near the sinks. Cannie slips on wet tile and falls hard, hitting her belly on a sink edge.

She wakes in a hospital. Friends tell her what happened in pieces. Her daughter was delivered early and is alive but fragile, in the neonatal unit. Cannie herself needed emergency surgery and had a hysterectomy, so she will not be able to carry another pregnancy. Joy, that is the baby's name, will need to stay in the hospital for weeks.

Cannie falls into a heavy depression after. She visits Joy and feels scared to touch someone so small. She stops answering calls. She walks for hours through the city instead of eating or sleeping. She eats very little. The weight comes off, the weight she chased for years, and it means nothing. It frightened me to read. Weiner does not make it pretty or wise. Cannie is thin and empty.

During one long walk she gets lost and ends up near Peter's office. By now Dr. K has become Peter to her, his first name out in the open. He sees how bad things are. He takes her to his place, lets her shower, makes her something warm to eat. He does not give a speech. He tells her he cares about her. That steadiness cracks something open. She starts to see how far she pulled away from everyone who loves her.

When Joy is strong enough to come home, Cannie moves in with her mother for a while. It is crowded and loud and exactly what she needs. Her mom helps with night feeds. Tanya helps in her gruff way, holding the baby like she knows how even though she pretends not to care. Samantha visits constantly. Peter visits too, and their friendship turns into dating, slow and careful. He is patient with Joy. He is patient with Cannie.

Cannie moves back to her own apartment eventually. Peter says he wants to move in. She says yes, scared and glad together. As a last piece of unfinished business, she walks into the offices of the magazine where Bruce works and introduces herself as C. The editors are stunned, then excited. They offer her the chance to write the column herself, to answer back in her own voice.

That ending could have felt cute. For me it felt earned. Cannie spent the whole book being written about by men, by her father, by Bruce. Now she gets to write about herself. She accepts her body, not because it got smaller, but because it carried Joy and survived surgery and walks her through Philadelphia every day. She accepts her family, weird partners and fights and all. She keeps her friends, her dog, her job, and adds a daughter and a good man who cooks when she forgets to eat.

What stays with me is how ordinary the happiness is. No big wedding. No revenge scene where Bruce begs. Just an apartment with baby bottles drying by the sink, Nifkin sniffing the crib, Samantha calling to check, Peter leaving his toothbrush. Cannie still worries about weight. She still misses Bernard. She still wishes her father had been different. She goes on anyway.

If you like funny books with real grief inside, read this. If you want a perfect heroine who always says the right thing, skip it. Cannie can be prickly and self involved. She makes calls she should not make. She pushes people away. I forgave her because she notices when she does it and tries to repair. That felt human to me, more than any speech about acceptance could have.

FAQ

When was Good in Bed published?

Pocket Books published it in May 2001 in the United States. The first hardcover runs 376 pages, ISBN 9780743418164.

Is Good in Bed part of a series?

Yes. It is book 1 in the Cannie Shapiro series, followed by Certain Girls from 2008. Cannie also appears briefly in In Her Shoes, which is a separate novel.

Who does Cannie end up with?

She starts dating Peter Krushelevansky, the doctor she first knew as Dr. K. He moves in with Cannie while she raises her premature daughter Joy in Philadelphia.