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A middle-aged woman’s unlikely and hilarious tardy coming-of-age.Flyleaf will offer seating for up to 70 in-person guests, with priority access given to folks who purchase the book. Please indicate in the "Customer Comments" field (at checkout) if you’d like 1-2 seats held for you at the event!
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Meet Laura Harrigan. Depending on who Laura is talking to, she’s a psychiatrist, a business consultant, or a mother of twin boys at Yale. That last one is a new lie she’s trying on for size. In reality, Laura is middle-aged, childless, “involuntarily unmarried,” and works a job far beneath her capabilities. She is a graduate of Harvard, but as she notes, “Meeting other people’s expectations is something I am famously unable to do.” Most nights, Laura can be found at Baltimore’s least-glamorous dive, The Chicken Box, where the bartender knows when to call her an Uber. At the weekend, she might be hooking up with a care home aide at her elderly father’s birthday party, much to the chagrin of her uptight sister, Nadine.
The story follows Laura in her home in Baltimore and elsewhere through her fiftieth year. Each chapter marks her encounter with a new character—a family member or two, a potential lover, complete strangers–each offering their own brand of wisdom or judgment or wacky opinion. Somehow, through these entanglements, Laura begins to gather bits and pieces of the self-knowledge she is lacking. Most, if not all, coming-of-age stories are about young people, but this is a middle-aged coming-of-age.
Louise Marburg is the author of three collections of stories, the most recent being You Have Reached Your Destination, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has been published in such journals as Story, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and many others. Marburg studied design at the Kansas City Art Institute, is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin Division, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has been a scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a fellow at the Kenyon Writing Workshops, and her work has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A native of Baltimore, she lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg. Fancy Meeting You is her first novel.
Jill McCorkle has published seven novels and four collections of short stories. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books and four of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, the North Carolina Award for Literature and the Thomas Wolfe Prize; and has been inducted into the NC Literary Hall of Fame. McCorkle has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, and NC State where she remains affiliated with the MFA Program in creative writing and she is core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars.
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752 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd (Historic Airport Rd, Next to The Root Cellar), Chapel Hill, NC, United States, North Carolina 27514
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