Love Me Hardcover - 2003

by Garrison Keillor

When Larry Wyler heads east from Minnesota to New York in pursuit of the celebrated life of the writers he admires and the three-martini lunch, he leaves behind Iris, the college sweetheart he married. When he abandons the rural flats of St. Paul for the fabled high-rise housing William Shawn and his famous magazine, Wyler stumbles into meteoric success as a writer and a womanizer. However, he's soon brought low by an even quicker series of failures on both fronts. Iris catches Wyler in flagrante, living the New York high life, and when The New Yorker gives him the boot the jig is up. A chastened man, Wyler returns to Minnesota, where the only writing job he can get is as an advice columnist for the lovelorn. Writing under the pen name "Mr. Blue," Wyler doles out wry, knowing, and practical advice about seduction and mating to the heartbroken and the lonely. And only slowly, painfully, does Wyler figure out for himself how, after losing love, you can eventually get it back.

From one of America's most beloved writers comes a hilarious and heartfelt novel about ambition, success, and failure as well as the virtues of real love and a steady writing job.