Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison finds himself prostrate on the icy sidewalk of Madison Avenue. ‘Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,’ says a plump, sweaty-faced middle-aged woman as she hauls him to his feet.
This is Mimi, the antithesis of Harrison’s neurotic patients, and — it transpires, after a few more twists and turns — the love of his life. Harrison has recently parted from pretentious Gertrude, a woman who conceived a child by ‘parthenogenesis’ and ‘batiks without irony’.
Mimi is outspoken, generous, sexually inventive; her feet are huge, her flesh bulges out round her bra straps. With her, Harrison discovers that ‘True love is a FACT…Real love is ferocious.
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