Book at Bedtime - Capturing America - Starving Again

As part of Radio 4's Capturing America series, Mark Lawson selects short pieces by five American authors. By Lorrie Moore. Dennis's wife has left him and his cynical, whisky-slugging friend Mave is trying to help him pick up the pieces. She tries to assure him that the fact that his wife is seeing a Milanese man is a good thing; that it will make his wife feel that she's scruffy and so she will eventually long for her unkempt husband again. Mave thoroughly disapproves of the self-help books that Dennis is weeping into. She has a much more practical approach to her own love life, dismissing Dennis's accusation that her lover is a womaniser with, 'So, I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen!' Read by Jennifer Lee Jellicorse.