The Best Place to Be
"I looked out the window and was filled with contentment. I was on a train. There was no landscape, ugly or beautiful, to demand my attention ... None of the passengers within my view were badly dressed. I had the right book with me ... I was happily married but alone, nothing in the immediate past to regret, nothing in the immediate future to fear. In between—the best place to be."
At fifty, Grace Hanford has lived long enough to be a daughter, a stepdaughter, a girlfriend, a sister, a sister-in-law, a wife, a stepmother, and an orphan. She has fallen in and out of love—with troublesome men, with her glamorous mother, with her wild best friend, and with New York City—more times than she can count. Still, Grace is more comic than melancholic, and a gifted confessor. She lives life as if every day is a movie in which her role is yet to be determined—and her audience loves her for it.
In The Best Place to Be, we follow Grace from her fatherless childhood through her years at an all-girls college to adulthood in the city and her many dating escapades (and escapes) as an urban sophisticate. Wherever she may be, Grace tries to find her place in the world with humor and the blunt surprise of truth. And always, in the background, there is Grace's mother, brother, and the man she could or might or will call husband, out of reach—until she reaches.
In the tradition of Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, The Best Place to Be is at once funny, moving, and deeply provocative, a love letter to the self-determined woman that shimmers with hilarious insight and graceful wit.
(From the publisher.)
Other Work by Lesley Dormen
20 Over 40
- Short Fiction Anthology
- by David Galef and Beth Weinhouse
- September 2006
- University Press of Mississippi
- ISBN: 1578069033
Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives
- Essay Collection
- by Lori Leibovich
- March 2006
- HarperCollins
- ISBN: 0060737816
Live Your Best Life: A Treasure of Wisdom, Wit, Advice, Interviews, and Inspiration from O, The Oprah Magazine
- by O, The Oprah Magazine
- September 2005
- Oxmoor House
- ISBN: 0848731050
Life's a Stitch: The Best of Contemporary Women's Humor
- by Anne Safran Dalin
- April 2002
- Random House Reference
- ISBN: 0375719709
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
- Essay Collection
- by Nell Casey
- January 2002
- HarperPerennial
- ISBN: 0060007826
The Secret Life of Girls
- with Mark Zussman; drawings by Debra Solomon
- June 1984
- Plume
- ISBN: 0452255082