Fancy Meeting You

A middle-aged womans unlikely and hilarious tardy coming-of-age.Meet Laura Harrigan. Depending on who Laura is talking to, shes a psychiatrist, a business consultant, or a mother of twin boys at Yale. That last one is a new lie shes 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 peoples expectations is something I am famously unable to do. Most nights, Laura can be found at Baltimores 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 fathers 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 charactera family member or two, a potential lover, complete strangerseach 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.