Happy Family

A mordantly funny and propulsive novel about a woman coming to terms with her family - adoptive, biological, and future.

In 1962 a pregnant girl staggers into a health clinic, gives birth, and flees. A foster family takes the baby in, and an unlikely couple, their lives unspooling from the recent death of their infant, adopts her.

Forty years and many secrets and lies later, Cheri Matzner is all grown up and falling apart. Ironic and fierce, she's a former cop turned disgruntled academic, a frustrated wife trying to get pregnant, an iconoclastic daughter bearing war wounds from her dysfunctional family. Thrust into an odyssey of acceptance, she discovers that sometimes it takes half a lifetime to come of age.

Weaving together the stories of the deeply flawed but well-intentioned people who've shaped Cheri's life, Happy Family is an intimate exploration of the gap between our expectations and beliefs about our families - and the truth.