Writers and Lovers

Casey Peabody is thirty-one, deep in debt, and still writing the novel she started six years ago. It's 1997, her mother has just died suddenly, and Casey is waiting tables in Harvard Square while renting a moldy room behind a garage. A former junior golf prodigy who gave up the sport, she's now trying to finish the book that has consumed most of her adult life while her friends marry, have children, and build careers.

At the restaurant she meets two very different men — one steady and grounded, one magnetic but unreliable — and finds herself drawn between them even as she tries to hold her writing and her grief together. As an agent finally takes an interest in her manuscript, Casey has to decide what kind of life, and what kind of love, she actually wants.

A quiet, closely observed novel about art, ambition, and the particular exhaustion of being broke and unsure in your thirties, told with dry humor and without sentimentality.