Love or Something Like It
By Deirdre Shaw
(Random House, Hardcover, 9781400067701, 256pp.)
Publication Date: April 14, 2009
Categories: General
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A clear-eyed, emotionally honest debut about a thirtysomething woman forced to redefine her entire world after her young marriage falters, Love or Something Like It proves we can grow up at any age.
When Lacey Brennan meets Toby, a sweet and talented comedian, she impulsively moves across the country to be with him in Los Angeles. Lacey is unsure of what she is looking for out west–love? a new career? an escape from her fractured family?–but is reassured when Toby proposes on her thirtieth birthday. “I was thirty and I finally knew what I was doing,” she says.
In California, which Lacey calls “the edge of the earth,” she has the giddy, anticipatory feeling that anything can happen–opportunity looms large, and her life may yet turn out the way she wants it to. But soon in her marriage with Toby, from their awkward honeymoon in Paris to their desperate attempts to build careers, Lacey knows that something is wrong. Toby, unemployed, becomes a permanent fixture on the couch, and things are no better at Lacey’s TV job, where a pit bull stalks her, colleagues tyrannize her, and her boss hits on her. Meanwhile, her twin brother has dropped off the face of the earth, and Lacey begins to wonder whether she and Toby should start a family if she can’t even figure out her own. It is only after Lacey has given up on both L.A. and love that she gets an unexpected shot at happiness.
Rich with wry humor and wisdom, Deirdre Shaw’s novel deftly portrays a relatable, unforgettable character in Lacey Brennan, who, after a five-year quest for love and belonging, finds she must live in the moment in order to understand her past and face her future.
Deirdre Shaw’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her fiction was included in the New Short Fiction Series Emerging Voices Group Show in Los Angeles in 2005, and she was awarded a 2004 Hackney Literary Award for National Short Story. Shaw lives with her husband in Los Angeles, where she has also written for television.
"Through Lacey Brennan, this novel's winsome heroine, Deirdre Shaw has written movingly about what it's like to be displaced—to be a New Yorker living in L.A. and for a time in Nebraska, to grow up the child of divorce. The passages from Lacey's childhood are especially compelling. And I'll never forget the novel's opening chapter."—Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony
"Love or Something Like It reads like the long-awaited letter from that friend of yours who decamped to L.A. a decade ago: newsy, funny, sad, triumphant. It's a pleasure to settle in with Shaw's narrator, warm, unpretentious Lacey Brennan, as she struggles out of a painful starter marriage and into her own life."—,Caitlin Macy, author of The Fundamentals of Play
“A believable, honest and observant portrait of a woman who gets what she wants only after giving up what she thought she needed.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Bright and promising . . . [Deirdre] Shaw’s first novel unfolds easily, with well-crafted prose and vivid detail. . . . This is a great young-in-L.A. novel.”—Publishers Weekly
“A delicious, honest look at what it is to live, love, and languish in L.A. From the first celebrity-attended, social-climbing pool party, Deirdre Shaw’s fresh prose and witty observations will have you hooked.”—Katie Crouch, author of Girls in Trucks
“Deirdre Shaw’s gifts are enormous, and Lacey’s story, at once recognizable and wholly unique, is full of depth and heart. Shaw’s writing is witty, wrenching, and beautiful. This novel is an intimate portrait of a complex young woman, a stunning debut from an immensely talented young writer. Love or Something Like It is brilliant or something exactly like it!”—Lisa Glatt, author of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That
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