Payback

A novel of lifelong reckoning between two women by the award-winning, beloved author.

Unbeknownst to her many fans, Quin Archer, the revenge-loving queen of the reality-TV show "Payback," was once an angry teen named Heidi--and her true story may be known only to Agnes, who was her art teacher at a private New England girls' school in the 1970s. Then a young woman herself, Agnes saw a spark of originality in the brooding Heidi. But when she suggests Heidi visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the girl returns with a disastrous account of having been picked up at the museum by an older man. Agnes's stunned, victim-blaming response will haunt both women for decades. Gordon narrates this tale of #metoo misunderstanding, from a time before there was language to contain it, with a sharp sense of life's changing tempo, carrying us through Heidi's disappearance and reinvention as Quin, and Agnes's escape into career and family in Italy--until, inevitably, they meet again. A remarkable book about the precise weight of our words and deeds, from a writer whose moral vision is deeply rewarding in its subtlety.

MARY GORDON is the author of nine novels, including There Your Heart Lies, Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; six works of nonfiction, including the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and three collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received many other honors, including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.