One day, TV talk show host O'Donnell (Kids Are Punny), aka Rosie, impulsively left a phone message for a pregnant, 14-year-old girl, whose tragic story of rape she had learned about at the New Jersey adoption agency she funds. Within days, the girl, Stacie, called back. Rosie introduced herself and offered to help the girl in any way she could. "And as I said those words, it was like a shell breaking open or a bird coming out," writes O'Donnell. "I said hello and a crack came, and we all fell in, straight into looking-glass land." What follows is an enormously powerful story about the mystery of identity, about how forces strong enough to shatter one person can make another shine like a diamond. Rosie chronicles her increasingly obsessive phone and e-mail relationship with a poor, broken kid who comes to show her that beneath her gifts of humor, fame, money and even love, she is still the child who lost her mother and is calling out to her. But what makes this brief book extraordinary by any standard is that it captures the way a core self, a true I, can appear in the midst of the most broken life. In the kind of lean, clean, witty prose that comes only with complete honesty, Rosie imparts some unexpected truths. Readers will come away persuaded that the road of obsessiveness can sometimes lead to the palace of wisdom, that faith and grace are real. Those who declare this merely a sexual "coming-out" story (there are passing references to dating a woman and to Rosie's partner, Kelli) need a heart and brain transplant. Here, Rosie offers us an unsentimental and utterly real tale about the power of love. (One-day laydown, Apr. 16)
