"I stand holding the Macy's bag half full of the few last dear things I dare take with me. I avoid his big green eyes made twice as large by the thick glasses he's worn since adolescence. I'd see too much in them, too much of myself, of us. I'd see twenty-three years and not all of them bad. I remind myself I'm not leaving because I don't love him anymore but because I do, because love, what's left of it, is my shackle. If I stay I can only be who he wants me to be, and even then only when he wants me to
be it."
Look at Me Now is the story of a woman struggling to begin a new life after twenty years married to a brilliant but overbearing man who has dominated every aspect of her existence. Her struggle involves not just creating a new life for herself but coming to grips with the past that has made her who she isβand isn't: an abusive, philandering mate, an early pregnancy that caused her expulsion from an elite New York high school, a mother who has remained largely unsympathetic.
But Deirdre Davis is nothing if not a woman who can laugh, or at least smile, at her fate and find sympathy with others'βthe crippled survivor of a marital suicide pact, a flaky boyfriend, the son whose conception she has spent most of her life blaming for all the bad things that have happened to her. Meanwhile, the husband she thought she had escaped keeps popping up, usually to terrorize her but eventually in a denouement that shows Deirdre's struggles toward becoming her own person have not been in vain.
"Look at Me Now is a book you shake your head at: This can't have been written by a man! But the author really is a manβa man gifted with sensitivity and depth that allow him canny insights into a woman's soul."
- Anjana Basu, author of Curses in Ivory (HarperCollins)
"A novel of gaining strength as an independent woman, Look at Me Now is inspiring and entertaining, highly recommended."
"In Deirdre Davis, Thomas J. Hubschman has given voice to a complex, flawed, ultra-real heroine who compels us to be not only captive to her story but complicit in its outcome."
- Richard Cumyn, author of The View from Tamischeira (Dundurn Press)
Thomas J. Hubschman is the author of Song of the Mockingbird, My Bess, Billy Boy, Father Walther's Temptation, The Jew's Wife & Other Stories and three science fiction novels. His work has appeared in New York Press, The Antigonish Review, Eclectica, The Blue Moon Review and many other publications. Two of his short stories were broadcast on the BBC World Service. He has also edited two anthologies of new writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.