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"Fancy Meeting You is a smart, funny, high-speed romp with a heroine who will keep you perched and ready for anything. With impeccable comic timing, Louise Marburg also has the daring to skate as close as possible to life’s dark edges, sometimes bringing us to that suspenseful place of wondering: do I laugh or do I cry?"—Jill McCorkle, Old Crimes and Hieroglyphics
An middle-aged woman’s unlikely and hilarious tardy coming-of-age.
Laura Harrigan, the snarky protagonist of Fancy Meeting You is a middle-aged, involuntarily unmarried woman—given to big lies, profanity, and a deeply wicked sense of humor. To quote her: "I’ve been called an alcoholic, dishonest, crazy, a narcissist, shallow, irresponsible, a slut, and once—my favorite—'too smart.’" Laura has a snotty sister she occasionally abhors and a best friend and partner in crime, Javier, who regularly hangs out with her at the Chicken Box, where the bartender knows when to call her an Uber. She is a graduate of Harvard who works a job far beneath her capabilities, though it is daily enlivened by the mood swings of her hapless boss.
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 judgement 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.
Hardcover ISBN 9781958888834
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.
