Description

Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next -- sometimes comically, sometimes catastrophically -- as if her own survival depended upon it.

Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel's poetry class, has aspirations beyond her work at a local family planning clinic. But she spends her nights wondering why her husband kissed one of her colleagues and whether it will lead to a full-fledged affair. She is also preoccupied with one of her repeat patients, Georgia, a teenager whose frequent clinic visits speak volumes. What they all have in common is their desire for love, despite its many obstacles.

A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is a novel rife with wit and compassion. A provocative, assured new voice in literary fiction, Lisa Glatt eyes the yardsticks by which we constantly measure our world and ourselves -- devotion, lust, forgiveness, and courage.

Praise for A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That…

"An appealingly dark first novel...authentic, substantial and engaging."

-- The New York Times Book Review

"Glatt's brave and vulnerable observations channel the provocative writer Anne Sexton....She dares to infuse dark humor where tear-jerking sentimentality would be easier....A powerful debut."

-- The San Diego Union-Tribune

"A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That adds an emphatic exclamation point to the start of a promising career."

-- Vanity Fair

"Razor sharp and exceedingly funny. A heartfelt and troubling book about how things go wrong, time after time, and how we manage in spite of it."

-- Frederick Barthelme