Confessions of an Ex-girlfriend

Emma Carter is thirty-one, single and living in New York City, and her life has just gone sideways in several directions at once. Her boyfriend has taken a job in L.A. Her hairdresser has found God.

She has also put on ten pounds of what she calls relationship flab while falling for a man who was afraid of commitment, and she assumes that rules her out of any new romance.

Emma works in the wedding world, in a job tied to editorial meetings and the business of planning brides' big days. Even her mother, the latest bride in the family, has put her to work on the wedding.

Surrounded by showers, gifts and ceremony, Emma has reached a sour conclusion: if a woman does not marry, she gets nothing. She once suggested, half joking, in an editorial meeting that a woman should get a bridal shower at thirty whether or not there is a wedding. Her colleagues looked at her as if she were mad. Emma, meanwhile, wonders when someone will hand her the free cookware.

The book is a comic women's fiction novel told in Emma's own voice, organized around numbered confessions about dating and single life in the city. The tone is wry and self-mocking, and the pace is light.