Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel (Paperback)

Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel By Hilary Thayer Hamann Cover Image

Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel (Paperback)

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June 2010 Indie Next List


“This book was engaging from the very first page, and demanded my attention throughout. This is a work that truly touched me, and I cannot recommend it more highly. It will change the way you look at life. The characters feel like family, and it was hard to leave them as I turned the last page. As soon as I finished, I wanted to read it again!”
— Hillary Smith, Copperfield's Books, Sebastopol, CA

This is what it’s like to be a high-school-age girl.
To forsake the boyfriend you once adored.
To meet the love of your life, who just happens to be your teacher.
To discover for the first time the power of your body and mind.
 
This is what it’s like to be a college-age woman.
To live through heartbreak.
To suffer the consequences of your choices.
To depend on others for survival but to have no one to trust but yourself.
 
This is Anthropology of an American Girl.
A literary sensation, this extraordinarily candid novel about the experience of growing up female in America will strike a nerve in readers of all ages.

Hilary Thayer Hamann was born and raised in New York. After her parents divorced, she was shuttled between their respective homes in the Hamptons and the Bronx. She attended New York University, where she received a B.F.A. in Film & Television Production and Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts, an M.A. in Cinema Studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and a Certificate in Anthropological Filmmaking from NYU’s Center for Media, Culture, and History.
 
Ms. Hamann edited and contributed to Categories—On The Beauty of Physics (2006), an interdisciplinary educational book that was included in Louisiana State University’s list of top 25 non-fiction books written since 1950.
 
As the assistant to Jacques d’Amboise, founder and artistic director of the National Dance Institute, Ms. Hamann produced We Real Cool, a short film based on the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, directed by Academy Award-winning director Emile Ardolino. She also coordinated an international exchange with students from America and the then Soviet Union based on literature, music, and art. She has worked in New York’s film, publishing, and entertainment industries, and is co-director of Films on the Haywall, a classic film series in Bridgehampton, New York.
 
Ms. Hamann lives in Manhattan and on Long Island.

Product Details ISBN: 9780385527156
ISBN-10: 0385527152
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: June 14th, 2011
Pages: 592
Language: English
Series: Random House Reader's Circle

“Remember what it feels like to be seventeen? Eveline Auerbach sounds like somebody many of us knew—or were. . . . A realistic, resonant, and universal story.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“As vast and ambitious as the country itself.”—Carolyn See, The Washington Post

“If publishers could figure out a way to turn crack into a book, it’d read a lot like [Anthropology of an American Girl]. Hamann’s debut traces the sensual, passionate, and lonely interior of a young woman artist growing up in windswept East Hampton at the end of the 1970s. . . . A marvelously complex and tragic figure of disconnection, startlingly real and exposed at all times.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[A] page-turning read [that] rivets through a rawness of complex emotion . . . Like Jane Austin, George Eliot or Edith Wharton, [Hamann] critiques her era and culture through the tale of a precocious young woman buffeted by the accidents, values and consequences of her age.”—Providence Journal-Bulletin
 
 “Utterly original . . . a rare kind of novel—at once sprawling and intimate—whose excellence matches its grand ambition.”—The Dallas Morning News
 
“[A] serious descendant of the work of D. H. Lawrence.”—The Washington Post