I left my back door open : a novel /

Sinclair has a new heroine, Daphne "Dee-Dee" Dupree, a Chicago blues and jazz radio personality. Dee-Dee is single and living an upwardly mobile existence on the North Side. She is growing, changing, and aspiring to become a more complete woman by tackling gender issues of weight control and incest survival. As an African American professional woman in the '90s, she is constantly confronted with gender, race, and economic issues. Her friends add to her happiness and frustrations. There's 40-year-old Sharon, mother of a 15-year-old girl, who decides she's gay; Jade, an Asian belly dancer and fellow disk jockey; and Phil and Sarita, a couple struggling to raise a son and maintain their marriage. Leaving the back door open is how Dee-Dee approaches life and relationships; she always manages to keep her options open and leaves space for discussion, debate, and change. An entertaining account of an African American woman's search for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while learning to self-accept, self-love, and self-improve. --Lillian Lewis

"I am not young, or thin, or white, or beautiful,'' says the narrator of Sinclair's worldly-wise and entertaining new novel. Gun-shy after several catastrophic relationships, Chicago deejay Daphne (Dee Dee) Dupree is an outwardly successful African-American woman aching for self-realization. Sassy from the safety of her broadcasting booth, the heavy-set 41-year-old jauntily offers her weight as the cause of a recent breakup ("The brotha didn't 'preciate my meat"). In reality, Dee Dee struggles with the shame of being fat and bulimic. She yearns for mature love and the self-confidence she's sure will accompany finding the right man. Meanwhile, relationships she's relied on as stable fall into flux: the 20-year marriage of her high school friends Sarita and Phil is falling apart; her best friend, Sharon, has come bursting out of the closet, an enthusiastic lesbian at 40; Jade, her belly-dancing instructor and fellow deejay, is on the cusp of ending an unhappy marriage. Dee Dee's only constant is her cat, Langston. The mixed blessing of a sexual harassment suit at work brings union mediator Skylar into her life. Attraction notwithstanding, their romance is tentative and obstructed; his (white) ex-wife is trying to reconcile with him and his eight-year-old daughter relentlessly blocks her father's new interest. In the course of sorting all this out, Dee Dee takes stock and faces some long repressed childhood memories. Refreshingly upbeat and robustly spiritual, the novel steers clear of sentimental inspirational writing by means of its frank and funny dialogue, and follows Sinclair's (Coffee Will Make You Black; Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice) earlier successes admirably. Paperback rights to Avon; author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A witty narrative and sympathetic characters rescue (but just barely) a story that overexerts itself to include nearly every anxiety known to pop culture. 'Let's get real,' says Dee Dee Dupree. 'What are the chances of an overweight, over forty, black woman meeting Mr. Right?' This concern is at the center of almost all the other elements of Dee Dee's life: her job as a radio DJ in Chicago, the souring romantic relationships of her friends, and her struggle to make peace with being an incest survivor. As the story opens, Dee Dee is hardly excited about her arranged meeting with Skylar, a mediator brought in to settle a sexual harassment complaint filed by her friend Jade at the radio station. When Dee Dee and Skylar meet, however, the attraction is mutual, and they begin a tender if at times troubled relationship. As things go on, however, Dee Dee learns both through her own experience and observation of others that love is a briar patch. Jade considers leaving her domineering husband; high-school friend Sarita becomes increasingly detached from her husband, who then makes a move on Dee Dee; and best friend Sharon comes out as a lesbian, slightly rocking the friendship but most of all affecting Sharon's teenaged daughter, Tyeesha, who does all she can to rebel. Most worrisome to Dee Dee is her own tenuous relationship with Skylar's young daughter, Brianna, and with his ex-wife, who just won't go away. Playing unofficial counselor to everyone in sight, Dee Dee has a full emotional plate'while she desperately tries to reduce the portions on her literal one. Sinclair (Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice, 1996, etc.) realistically weaves together a variety of characters, offering a panoramic view of black women approaching 40. Unfortunately, much of the realism flies out the window at the close, when all strings are tied together happily and very quickly. Uneven at the end, but an amusing read.