Description

Join us as Ocean House owner and bestselling author, Deborah Goodrich Royce moderates a conversation with authors Annabel Monaghan and Alix Strauss to discuss their books Summer Romance and The Joy of Funerals, respectively. Refreshments will be served, including wine and light bites!

About Summer Romance: The heart-tugging and hilarious story of a professional organizer whose life is a mess, and the summer she gets unstuck with the help of someone unexpected from her past, by the bestselling author of Same Time Next Summer and Nora Goes Off Script. Benefits of a summer romance: It’s always fun, always brief, and no one gets their heart broken. Ali Morris is a professional organizer whose own life is a mess. Her mom died two years ago, then her husband left, and she hasn’t worn pants with a zipper in longer than she cares to remember. No one is more surprised than Ali when the first time she takes off her wedding ring and puts on pants with hardware—overalls count, right?—she meets someone. Or rather, her dog claims a man for her in the same way he claimed his favorite of her three children: by peeing on him. Ethan smiles at Ali like her pants are just right—like he likes what he sees. He looks at her as if she’s a version of herself she hasn’t been in a long while. The last thing newly single mom Ali needs is to make her life messier, but there’s no harm in a little summer romance. Is there? 

About The Joys of Funerals: From the very first page, readers are drawn into the strange, often humorous world where nine women grapple with sex, power, love, and death. Meet a widow who lusts…a daughter who aches…a lover who obsesses…a shopaholic who hungers… a daredevil who desires…a single woman who longs…an outsider who hopes…an artist who craves…and a funeral-junkie who needs. These are the women who inhabit the eerily honest, often heartbreaking world Alix Strauss has created in The Joy of Funerals. Throughout this powerful and provocative collection, these characters explore the basic need for human connection while seeking to understand themselves better. It is the ‘where do I belong’ and the ‘how do I fit in’ that these sad, bright and amazingly strong women seek to answer. In “Recovering Larry,” a woman mourns for her dead husband by having sex with grieving men. In “Shrinking Away,” a woman pays a daring shiva call on her psychiatrist’s widow. “Swimming Without Annette” explores a woman’s obsession with her wife’s killer, while “Still Life” peers into the life of a pregnant artist who wishes to paint herself out of a bad marriage and into a prettier world. In “Post-Dated,” a single woman wonders if her recently defunct date was perhaps the perfect man. Read independently, these vivid and raw stories stand on their own. When read as a collection, they are anchored together by the novella, “The Joy of Funerals,” which follows the life of Nina, a lonely, single thirty-something woman who attends the funerals of the deceased characters in the previous stories. Begun as an essay in the Lives column of The New York Times magazine, The Joy of Funerals is written with raw wit, mordant humor and a uniquely penetrating voice as Strauss turns the spotlight on the unattractive subjects of loss, grief and loneliness.