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On Sale: Feb 10, 2010
Page Count: 368 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13: 9780316122023

“Mary’s odyssey of heartache and hope is not so much about finding her husband as it is about rediscovering herself.” —People

On the eve of their Silver Anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband Jimmy—still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school—to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary’s life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband’s disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search.

For the first time in her life, she boards a plane and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary finds that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she finds fills her with inner strength she’s never felt before. Through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.

“Lansens—who lived so memorably inside the heads of conjoined twins Ruby and Rose in The Girls—sketches another indelible female character here. Mary Gooch … [is] original … heartbreakingly funny and sad.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A sensitive but deliciously comic account of Mary’s fight against the ‘obeast’ that has lived inside her since childhood.” —The New York Times Book Review