The idea for writing this novel was born one evening over take-out Thai and many glasses of wine with my besties. I had been divorced for a couple of years and had spent the past few months in the strange world of online dating. I was telling tales of my misadventures to my alternately amused/horrified friends.
After hearing how I had negotiated my way around some challenging situations, they suggested that I write a “how to” manual…an online dating for dummies. I am so not the manual writing sort and I figured someone out there probably had already done it and better than I ever could. But, a tell-all was a tempting idea…except for the part where I embarrassed the crap out of my two teenage sons, or maybe that was tempting too.
So I started. And something happened. It seemed like everywhere around me, people I cared about were experiencing tremendous losses. Two friends lost children, two friends were diagnosed with cancer, and another friend went through a painful divorce. I had gone through my own personal scare with cancer. We had all lost pieces of our bodies and pieces of our lives. We had all been rocked by these emotional tsunamis. It changed us. It had changed me.
I found that I needed this story to be about more. I still wanted it to be entertaining. I still wanted to make people laugh, but I also wanted to say I know what you’re going through. I wanted it to be a kind of love letter to anyone who had experienced heart-breaking loss.
Life seems to be a strange process of ongoing loss and change. Traveling though it with grace involves learning to let go. This book became an often humorous look at those losses and how they inevitably change us. It’s about how those changes make us grow and become more than we were, and the gifts that come with that.