Filthy Rich

Marcy Mallowitz has just been dumped — big time! Marcy’s orthodontist boyfriend, Neil, blew a gasket during an appearance on So You Want to Be Filthy Rich!, the stratospheric television phenomenon and top-rated quiz show of all time. When Marcy incorrectly answered his $1.75 million Lifeline question, Neil immediately broke off their preengagement, abruptly terminating their three-year relationship — in front of twenty million people coast to coast!

Suddenly Marcy isn’t just Marcy anymore. The thirtysomething Barnard Phi Beta Kappa and Personal Life Coach is now the nationally renowned victim of America’s “Big Brush-Off.” Media hounds are clamoring for interviews. The street in front of her West Village apartment is swarming with paparazzi sharks. And everyone — everyone — knows her name, even if only as the punchline to late-night talk-show jokes.

Marcy, who has made a career of improving other peoples’s lives, could now use some serious help reclaiming her own. But where does she turn? To her lovable, meddling, marriage-oriented mom? To her protective dad, who dreams of Marcy joining the family roach extermination company? To her two decidedly oddball best girlfriends? Marcy Mallowitz’s fifteen minutes of fame are lasting a lot longer than she would ever have dreamed possible. And now she’ll either have to find someplace to hide from the all-seeing, unblinking media eye…or agree to expose herself to the world, à la Survivor’s naked fat guy.

A dazzling debut novel as winning and smart as it Is uproariously funny, Dorothy Samuels’s Filthy Rich is an unprecedented delight — a story of women, men, friends, and mothers; of fame and romance in the early twenty-first century; and of that contemporary nemesis of modern love: reality TV.