Title: She Needed Me
Subtitle: a novel
Description: Walter Kirn "should be sentenced to a lifetime writing fiction," proclaimed The New York Times Book Review about his short story collection, My Hard Bargain. The Christian Science-Monitor praised his "engaging blend of deadpan humor and genuine empathy"; "Thankfully," said The Philadelphia Inquirer, "Kirn never abandons his theme of uncertainty when observing modern angst." Now Walter Kirn has fashioned She Needed Me, a moving, surprising, and darkly comic novel whose.

Sympathetic portrait of a disillusioned generation is mercifully uncynical. Weaver Walquist and Kim Lindgren first meet outside a St. Paul, Minnesota, abortion clinic. Kim - twenty-three, pregnant, with no money to finish junior college - is about to walk inside. Weaver is lying in front of the door. At twenty-six, he is a Bible-carrying member of the Conscience Squad, a fanatical right-wing protest group ... yet readers of all minds will be drawn to this gentle, questing.

Soul as he struggles with his feelings for Kim and his subsequent sexual desire for her; his crumbling devotion to the church; and his waning loyalty to his employer, Sanipure, a Christian soap and cosmetics company that calls sales "fellowship moments." But Weaver was not always devout. The only child of a widowed, highly successful Wisconsin liquor store owner, he tried to ward off teenage isolation with a mixture of pot and pills, vodka, sex and heavy metal music,

Until born-again Christian Lucas Boone found him half dead on the floor of a Greyhound station men's room. As Weaver tries to persuade Kim to have her baby, they embark upon a journey that brings them into contact with a cast of keenly drawn characters: Chuck and Dixie Lindgren, Kim's parents, who made more money in one hot Las Vegas weekend than they ever earned from their North Dakota farm; charismatic, paranoid Lucas Boone, popping anti-depressant pills like candy.

Kim's disaffected brother, Ricky, who makes a modest living burglarizing his relatives' homes; and finally sharp-tongued Margaret Walquist, whom Weaver always thinks of as "my mother the businesswoman." A funny, bittersweet chronicle of young people falling in love and searching for answers in a crazy, changing world, She Needed Me is vibrant and honest without being judgmental. Walter Kirn, whose stories evoked "the feeling ... that life's simple, and that it's also too.

Complex to even begin to understand" (Rick Bass, The Dallas Morning News) has triumphed again with a novel that aims for the human heart - and strikes its mark.
Subjects: Fiction, Moral and ethical aspects of Abortion, Abortion, Minnesota, fiction, Moral and ethical aspects
Places: Saint Paul (Minn.)