From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—the"brilliant and funny" story (Joan Didion, bestselling author of Let Me Tell You What I Mean) of a woman whose attempts to escape herself become instead an occasion for confronting the self-deception that has driven her since childhood.

Joan Foster is a woman with numerous identities and a talent for shedding them at will. She has written trashy gothic romances, had affairs with a Polish count and an absurd avant-garde artist, and played at being a politically engaged partner to her activist husband.

After a volume of her poetry becomes an unexpected literary sensation, her new fame attracts a blackmailer threatening to reveal her secrets. Joan’s response is to fake her own death and flee to a hill town in Italy.

Studded with hair-raising comic escapades and piercing psychological insights, Lady Oracle is both hilarious and profound.