Reconsidering Happiness

The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life. In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other's lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course. Sherrie Flick is the author of the award-winning flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Norton's Flash Fiction Forward and New Sudden Fiction. A recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, she works in Pittsburgh as a freelance writer and artistic director for the Gist Street Reading Series.

Author: Sherrie Flick
Publisher: Bison
Published: 08/01/2009
Pages: 220
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 8.38h x 5.58w x 0.47d
ISBN: 9780803225213


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/20/2009 pg. 121
Booklist 09/01/2009 pg. 40

About the Author
Sherrie Flick is author of the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting and the short story collection Whiskey, Etc., a bronze prize winner for the Foreword INDIES best short story collection of 2017. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Flash Fiction Forward, and New Sudden Fiction. A recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship and residencies from Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, she teaches in the MFA and Food Studies programs at Chatham University in Pittsburgh and serves as co-director of the Chautauqua Writers' Festival.