Event

Stephanie Clifford: Everybody Rise

Sponsored by Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler's

Wednesday, September 16, 2015
7:30pm

Kepler's Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Called a modern day Edith Wharton, in Stephanie Clifford's debut novel she portrays both the triumphs and agonies of a young woman trying to survive in a new world that she doesn't quite understand. The novel, its title derived from a Stephen Sondheim lyric, has been compared to The Bonfire of the Vanities because of the sharp-eyed picture it paints of a moneyed world and its glamorous inhabitants.

Dive into the voyeuristic treat of watching the blindly ambitious Evelyn rise through old-money New York Society, falter, and fail in a way you can't quite imagine. Set in 2006 in the Manhattan of the young and glamorous, money and class are colliding in a city that is about to go over a financial precipice and take much of the country with it. Evelyn Beegan, the 26-year-old protagonist, gets a job at a social network aimed at the elite and her involvement in high society goes from outsider to dangerous obsession.

Recruiting new members for the site, Evelyn steps into a promised land of Adirondack camps, Newport cottages and Southampton clubs thick with socialites and Wall Streeters. Despite herself, Evelyn finds the lure of belonging intoxicating, and starts trying to pass as old money herself. When her father, a crusading class-action lawyer, is indicted for bribery, Evelyn must contend with her own family's downfall as she keeps up appearances in her new life, grasping with increasing desperation as the ground underneath her begins to give way.

Stephanie Clifford is a Loeb Award-winning report at the New York Times. She grew up in Seattle and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.

The event is free - please register today.