Jean Kerr Books in Order

Jean Kerr recounts moving her family from Manhattan to suburban Larchmont, where the promise of space brings new complications. These essays find humor in childrearing, marriage, home decorating, neighborhood life, and sustaining a theatrical career.

Silent-film producer Max risks his backers’ patience on an extravagant Egyptian epic. Keeping his disillusioned leading lady Maggie on set requires increasingly elaborate maneuvering, while his determination to finish the film becomes complicated by unexpected love.

Drawing on family life and her work in theatre, Jean Kerr turns daily frustrations into comic essays. Vacations with children, supposedly helpful modern conveniences, and the ordeal of opening a play reveal the absurdities beneath ordinary routines.

Summoned to help with her former husband’s tax problems, Mary returns to a relationship damaged by insecurity and relentless wit. A film star’s attentions unsettle her assumptions while her ex-husband prepares to marry someone else.

A celebrated British poet visits America while concealing doubts about the marriage that inspired his famous grief-stricken verses. A publisher’s secretary determined to marry him pushes him toward an uncomfortable confrontation with the truth.

Jean Kerr turns her comic eye on everyday life in fifteen short pieces. From the hazards of entertaining at home to changing fashions and the phenomenon of Twiggy, the collection finds absurdity in familiar social situations.

Katy and Jeff Cooper’s comfortable suburban marriage is fraying as each becomes receptive to someone else’s attention. Their college-age son’s arrival with his actress lover exposes contradictions in the household and sets off a family crisis.

A marriage counselor and an unconventional woman discover their spouses are having an affair. They invent a romance of their own in response, turning a shared humiliation into a tangled comedy of jealousy and changing attachments.

When eighteen-year-old Jenny enters an elderly priest’s household, he sets out to make her more fashionable and appealing to boys. His matchmaking efforts become complicated when she chooses an older man who fears standing in her way.

Egotistical cartoonist Larry Larkin plans to marry his admiring secretary and hire a replacement artist for his honeymoon. The newcomer decides to rescue the bride from that future, helped by the boy Larry adopts to improve his image.