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Personal Velocity Hardcover – September 2, 2001

by Rebecca Miller (Author)

3.8 20 ratings

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—

A debut collection of short fiction examines the richly varied lives of modern-day women--Greta, a cookbook editor; Nancy, a troubled nine-year-old girl; Delia, an abused wife; and others--in seven intriguing portraits of women of different ages and classes as they deal with fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation, and other challenges of life. 45,000 first printing.

Length

160
Pages
Language

EN
English
Publisher

Grove Pr
Publication date

2001
September 2
Dimensions

6.0 x 0.9 x 8.5
inches
ISBN-10

080211699X
ISBN-13

978-0802116994
See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity offers a wry take on work, sex, and relationships in the lives of seven people in search of what it means to be a 21st-century woman. Sharp and intimate, these stories are a capsule wardrobe of contemporary American femininity, from off-the-peg urban identities prepackaged by a designer label to battered, homeless survivors whose lives are held together only by their own emotional stamina. Greta, a cookbook editor, dumps her husband for fame and pointy alligator flats; Louisa, an artist, squeezes out her lovers faster than paint from a tube; and pregnant Paula picks up a young hitchhiker on a rainy night.

Miller brings a clear and unsentimental eye to her characters, and pleasing brevity of style and compressed drama to her prose. Flawed and admirable, terrified and fearless, cavalier and overanxious by turns--the vagaries of personality are encompassed in this poised debut. Many a reader may catch a fleeting glimpse of her own contradictory reflections in Miller's intense snapshots of modern women. --Rachel Holmes, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

Reading this slim collection is a bit like watching the Lifetime channel with the sound off: recognizable character types are identifiable by their physical appearance and habitats and the dramas they play out are presented with little elucidation. In the seven sketches in this debut, contemporary women (and one girl) from various backgrounds tussle with work, relationships and identity. Representing the affluent are frustrated and insecure Julianne, married to a much older famous poet; troubled nine-year-old Nancy, who contends with a dissatisfied socialite mother and a father who barely notices her presence; and Greta, a young editor in New York whose newfound success is incompatible with her marriage. Then there is flaky artist Louisa, tumbling from one affair to the next; and Paula , pregnant and in denial, who tries to help a young hitchhiker on a rainy night. Rounding out the group is working-class Delia, an abused wife who relies on her sexuality, and Bryna, a farmer's wife who likes to imagine herself being interviewed for Redbook (and who has brief walk-ons as a cleaning woman in two of the other stories). Miller does know something about the people in these worlds (she is particularly tuned into the shorthand, insider chat of rich bohemians), but the affectless prose not to mention the author's penchant for describing her characters' breasts and buttocks doesn't allow for much character development or resolution, and often reads like flat reportage. Some grit and a few moments of poignancy are in evidence, but the collection provides little insight into the unique inner workings of seven very different women. Agent, Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (Sept.)Forecast: Miller, a director and the daughter of Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath, received critical raves in 1996 for her indie film, Angela. Look for strong initial presence with a first printing of 35,000, a major ad campaign and 13-city author tour.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Pr; First Edition (September 2, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 080211699X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802116994
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.88 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,513,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #24,087 in Short Stories (Books)
- #60,342 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #66,715 in American Literature (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 20 ratings

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Rebecca Miller

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Rebecca Miller is a writer and filmmaker whose films include "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee", "The Ballad of Jack and Rose", "Personal Velocity", and "Angela". You can find her blog, and more about her books and films at www.rebecca-miller.com.

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3.8 out of 5

20 global ratings

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edith lawrence

finger on the pulse of each

Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2003

Verified Purchase

Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity is poignant and insightful. The details of different women's psyche is in the way of a genius. I thoroughly enjoyed this book..she needs to write a novel..I was longing for the stories to go on.

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Amazon Customer

personal velocity: wow...

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2001

personal velocity: wow, the stories really show the psyche of different women. i really enjoyed the stories. i couldn't wait to read the next story. finished the book in 2 days. also, as a guy, the stories made me reflect and think about women. the stories are really engaging, as well as the characters.

2 people found this helpful

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Jaclyn Geller

Fascinating New Collection of Short Stories

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2001

I rarely read contemporary fiction, because it's almost always dissapointing. At [a store] last week I picked up this slim hardcover volume from a stack on the floor, attracted by the bright cover I suppose. I began reading and couldn't stop. It was as if I had stepped inside a world created by a female Raymond Carver -- a world of women of different ages and backgrounds and occupations, each of whom feels absolutely real, each of whom has her motivations stripped bare in a few phrases. Rebecca Miller's style is so direct and unsentimental that it's disorienting at first, but if one sticks with it and gets used to the cadences of her sentences, the result is very powerful. The unflattering, almost Swiftian descriptions of her characters' bodies may be hard to take for some readers, but I think they contribute to a deliberately naturalistic account of contemporary women's lives. My favorite story is that of Bryna, a wife who fantasizes about being profiled in Redbook Magazine. It's a deft little satire on the way in which glossy magazine accounts of celebrity infect the imaginations of American women. This understated collection is like an antidote to the ostentatiously sensitive prose of so many current trade writers.
Yesterday I recommended _Personal Velocity_ to one of my undergraduate students. She had already started reading it and informed me that the author is Arthur Miller's daughter. Perhaps literary talent does run in the blood, because this is an impressive debut.

13 people found this helpful

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SoCalGal

Two Stars

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2015

Boring

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2022

When a person of privilege assumes to write about non-persons of privilege but gives them all the neurotic, psychotic traits found in the elite, i.e., self-absorption, weirdness born out of ennui and lack of guidance and indulgence, for starters and overlays it with a film of the disgusting, you have a tangled mess of something sub-par trying to call itself literature. A cold offering that did nothing to touch me, move me, inspire or even impress me, except to fill me with the question, who did she know to get published. And then I realized, she is Arthur Miller's daughter and married to Daniel Day-Lewis.
I do not recommend this boring, dragging excuse of a book.

One person found this helpful

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businesschic

Let yourself be taken away

Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2004

This is an opportunity to feel everything these vividly developed and diversely portreyed women feel and experience. This book is it's own adventure into the lives of an excentric artist, a tragic victem of passion and domestic abuse, an ambitious intellectual and her change of life on the way to the top, and many more. All very real and very compelling, you will feel this book.

One person found this helpful

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Pretty good collection... (3 1/2 stars)

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2004

Personal Velocity is a collection of 7 stories by the author Rebecca Miller. (daughter of playwright, Arthur Miller) All of the stories have women at their center. Most of the stories are independent, but there are a couple that share characters. I have seen the movie, which only included three of the stories. This may have made me biased, since I got a visual of those three stories.

Greta was about a woman who was planning on leaving her husband and has always had a problem with infidelity. She is always trying to impress her father, who left her mother when she was young. She is a cookbook editor who gets to edit a very popular authors book, and gets involved with him as well.

Delia is a woman who leaves her husband, finally, after continued beatings. She goes from a woman's shelter to an old acquaintence's house. She grew up very promiscuous and hasn't changed that much.

Louisa, who is also promiscuous, (I'm starting to notice a theme here) goes from lover to lover, and leaves when she starts to feel comfortable.

Julianne and Bryna go hand and hand, as Bryna is Julianne's maid. Bryna imagines being interviewed and often talks to herself. She looks at Julianne as being this perfect woman who is married to a poet/writer 15 years her senior. Bryna always wanted to be glamourous, but instead, marries a farmer and lives with him and his strange mother.

Nancy is a child who always has a nanny looking after her, but this nanny is also observing her, to see if she has anything wrong with her, because she once locked another girl in a closet.

Paula is a woman who picked up a hitchhiker after being with a man who traded places with her on the street and got hit by a car. She thinks that this will change her karma.

I liked the way this author writes, because she shows rather than tells, and she writes very simply to tell a deep story.

I liked certain stories more than others, some just grabbed me more, which is why it didn't receive a higher rating.

Basically, it was a little better than ok, but I have read some collections that I like more.

4 people found this helpful

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Anon

Nothing there

Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2004

I had been looking forward to reading this book for a while, it was well reviewed by many and I was so excited to get my hands on it, so you can only imagine my disapointment when I opened it up to find nothing really there.
The book consists of 7 short stories about women who have some sort of pyschological ailment or another. The stories are just not that good. In seems in her attempts to make these women interesting or enigmatic she forgets to give them a soul. Secondly, these women are not likable, they are weird, self indulgent, self pitying, and mopey. One previous reviewer said it best when she said that the stories don't end, they just stop. Thats so true. Just when you think you may be getting interested in one character the story stops.
This book was such a disapointment. If this is supposed to be a commentary on modern women, we should all be insulted and concerned.

8 people found this helpful

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Personal Velocity Hardcover – September 2, 2001

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