Guest Author Grace Coopersmith w/ a giveaway

Life’s a party.  Roll with it. Lively, pretty young socialite Nancy Carrington-Chambers has always believed that an excellent sense of style and strict attention to detail are what it takes to achieve a perfectly chic life. Now, however, her own haute couture marriage is starting to resemble a clearance rack, as husband Todd manifests more and more symptoms of a dread disease—incurable tackiness.

I’m primarily a humorist, and I often treat myself like one of my characters.  I say things that I think are amusing or entertaining and encourage a certain eccentric idea of who I am.  All right, I confess, I may be a little eccentric.  Or a lot. 

But the truth is that I take writing humorous fiction very seriously, and I’ve worked at both writing and humor most of my life.  I get a delicious feeling of satisfaction when readers tell me they laughed aloud at something I wrote.  There’s a connection there, a shared understanding of the human condition when we laugh together.

The protagonist of my new novel, Nancy Carrington-Chambers, is the girl you love to hate.  She’s pretty, privileged, judgmental, and self-centered.  She separates from her increasingly boorish husband to work on her event planning company, Froth.  She leaves their horrible McMansion in a half-abandoned development and returns to her chic bachelorette apartment in San Francisco’s posh Pacific Heights.

The very first thing Nancy does is to hire an assistant to help her resurrect one of the city’s most venerated, yet dreary fundraisers.  Derek is impeccably dressed, British, gorgeous, and gay.  Things are going well when Nancy’s irresponsible cousin abandons her four-year-old in Nancy’s care.  Somehow, Nancy, Derek, and the child forge a sort of family.

Little by little, we learn that Nancy’s life has not been the “lovely, lovely” image she projects.  It’s more like a beautiful piece of glass that has a slight crack.  The crack, only visible when you hold the glass to the light, is enough to make the glass much more fragile than it appears to be.  It doesn’t take much for Nancy’s world to shatter, and she must decide if she’ll risk everything she’s believed to be important in order to protect those she’s come to love.

When Derek asks Nancy why she puts on parties, she says, “Something magical happens when the ambience is right and people are celebrating.  It’s momentary and elusive, but as glorious as a butterfly.  I want to think that creating that shared joy is important.”

And that’s why I love writing stories that make people laugh and feel happy – I want to think that creating a shared joy is important.

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USA Only - Winner announced May 27th.

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