Tapestry of Fortunes

What’s it About?

A motivational speaker who isn’t great about taking her own advice finally does. After a catastrophic event, she moves out of her large, well-appointed house into a house she shares with three other women. After she receives a postcard from a man she never quite got over and last saw many years ago, she decides to take a driving trip to visit him. The other housemates come along, each for her own reason, each with her own agenda. So it’s a book about destiny, fate, memory, chance, possibility….

What was the inspiration?

I wanted to look at whether there can be a successful Act 3 in one’s life. Can you abandon all you’re familiar with and have it all work out, perhaps even for the better? I also love road trips. And pie. And I wanted to write about them. I also wanted to write about what happens when you get a bunch of women together, whether in a house they share or on a trip to their pasts– and, as it happens, to their futures.

Tapestry of Fortunes book cover
Random House – April, 2013

Excerpt

“It’s very quiet, and then somebody snorts, laughing. And then I laugh. And then we all do, we lie in the dark under the stars laughing and laughing. For too long, really. And then Joni rolls up onto her elbows and says,’I don’t know why I’m laughing so hard.’ ‘Because we can,’ Lise says, and she’s right. It’s as though there’s a dome of power around us, four women lying on the night-cooled earth, looking up and giving props to the same sky Cro-Magnon saw. Though for him the constellations were even clearer, much clearer, I’m sure. But this is enough, this starscape and these women and this moment.

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