Who is Julia, and why should we care to read beyond the only slightly derivative prologue? (How many times have we seen just such juxtaposition as the classy rich girl masquerading as whore or vice versa or a similar plot device?) Why should we be interested in her motivation for engaging in tawdry phone sex? A hint lies enmeshed in the dialogue between Julia and Arthur: "Why hadn't I just hung up?" Julia asks herself, in retrospect. "Was it the challenge? By accepting it was I proving how much I had changed?" Is Julia masquerading — for herself as well as for Arthur? I asked myself. Or has she really changed? And from what? These questions compelled me to keep reading.

Julia Sterling reveals herself in the monotone one would expect from a person who has lived her entire thirty-eight years under the psychoanalytic microscope of her father, a psychiatrist, and her husband, a psychiatrist-cum-agency head-cum-fund-raiser extraordinaire. She tells her story without fanfare, in the low-pitched and genteel voice one expects from an Ivy Leaguer and member of the upper crust. She tells us that "a good therapist has the ability to make a patient connect with her or her inner self." Unfortunately for Julia, her father and her husband have only succeeded in preventing Julia from connecting with herself. She knows she is merely a ghost in the background of her husband's life, a beautiful and elegant hostess who lends the necessary class to his efforts to catapult his nonprofit agency into the limelight. Julia's husband, Paul, is hypnotic in his ability to charm; Julia realizes she is merely an absent presence, "smoke about to evaporate in the much more vibrant presence of [her] husband."

An opportunity to write a book and, thus, utilize her journalism skills propels Julia into an association with Sam Butterfield. Butterfield heads the Butterfield Institute, a progressive sex clinic which advocates, as Sam explains to Julia, that humans need "to explore their sexual selves with each other, without holding back, or worrying how things will look to anyone outside the union." Initially Julia is threatened by the idea of writing a book with Sam, a fear that is exacerbated by her husband's ministrations to her psyche, during which he succeeds in convincing her that she is not "strong enough emotionally to sustain the pressure of the assignment." (We soon learn that Paul controls all aspects of Julia's life by keeping her in a limbo of self-detachment, an emotional vacuum that is the necessary result, he says, of her nervous breakdown in college.) But after overhearing a "therapist" at the Institute engaging in "role-playing therapy" with a "patient", something inside of Julia, an abandoned and dormant part of herself, stirs and comes to life. Instead of turning down the book offer, as Paul Sterling's dutiful wife should, Julia suggests to an enthusiastic Sam that she write the book from the first person viewpoint, allowing a phone sex therapist (in this case, herself) to speak directly to the reader, explaining the therapy and how it works in a way the lay person can understand. So begins Julia's exploration into the Institute's new and very successful form of therapy, and, as well, into the netherworld of her own sexuality, long suppressed by her husband and his disinterest in sex or, for that matter, any other kind of intimacy with her.

As Julia's skill as a phone sex therapist grows her sense of her own identity grows as well. No longer complacent about her role as her husband's hostess, but still afraid to upset the status quo of her marriage, Julia works on her research in secret, revealing her activities only to her best girlfriend and Jack, her oldest friend since her pre-breakdown college days. Julia becomes increasingly more discontented with her marriage even as her relationship with Jack takes on new meaning, a relationship primarily — and ironically enough — carried on over the phone lines.

The rather sordid details of Julia's life as a phone sex therapist are nicely offset by the mundane and ordinary aspects of her everyday life as Paul's wife. In one scene, we listen in as Julia speaks to total strangers the private words we usually reserve for our most intimate relationships, and some we may never use. In another, we listen as Julia and Paul discuss his work or their son, Max, a freshman at college or Paul's ongoing concern for Julia's mental health. Underlying all of Julia's interactions with her husband, though, is the reader's knowledge that Julia is lying to Paul about virtually all aspects of her life, and a sense that she most likely is doing what is best for her own self-preservation.

Rose allows Julia to quietly and powerfully build the story to its denouement without shocking us, which only works to make the climactic plot twist of the novel that much more disturbing. Even the psychiatrist-speak, which easily could have read as overdone, seems natural and understandable when voiced by Rose's characters, with the exception, perhaps, of Sam Butterfield's penchant for the word "fuck." Throughout much of the novel, it is hard to like Julia Sterling primarily because she allows her life to be manipulated by the men in her circle: her father, her husband, her friend Jack, and Sam Butterfield. Julia has so much and yet so little at the onset of the story that one wonders if she is really worth our attention. But perhaps that is one of the secrets to the readability of Lip Service. Julia reminds us of a real person about whom we can feel a grudging admiration when she succeeds in untangling the mess of her life. At the conclusion of the novel Julia appears to be on the road to a successful integration of her various selves; an ending that is perhaps too convenient but works to give the reader hope for Julia in her new existence.

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