LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore is pleased to present Deirdre Shaw, who signs and discusses her book Love or Something Like It.

Deirdre Shaw's emotionally honest, clear-eyed debut follows a thirty-something woman forced to redefine love, career, and family after her young marriage falters.

“Bright and promising...Shaw's first novel unfolds easily, with well-crafted prose and vivid detail. A great young-in-L.A. novel.” -- Publishers Weekly

A clear-eyed, emotionally honest debut about" "a thirtysomething woman forced to redefine her entire world after her young marriage falters," Love or Something Like It "proves we can grow up at any age.

When Lacey Brennan meets Toby, a sweet and talented comedian, she impulsively moves across the country to be with him in Los Angeles. Lacey is unsure of what she is looking for out west-love? a new career? an escape from her fractured family?-but is reassured when Toby proposes on her thirtieth birthday. "I was thirty and I finally knew what I was doing," she says.

In California, which Lacey calls "the edge of the earth," she has the giddy, anticipatory feeling that anything can happen-opportunity looms large, and her life may yet turn out the way she wants it to. But soon in her marriage with Toby, from their awkward honeymoon in Paris to their desperate attempts to build careers, Lacey knows that something is wrong. Toby, unemployed, becomes a permanent fixture on the couch, and things are no better at Lacey's TV job, where a pit bull stalks her, colleagues tyrannize her, and her boss hits on her. Meanwhile, her twin brother has dropped off the face of the earth, and Lacey begins to wonder whether she and Toby should start a family if she can't even figure out her own. It is only after Lacey has given up on both L.A. and love that she gets an unexpected shot at happiness.

Rich with wry humor and wisdom, Deirdre Shaw's novel deftly portrays a relatable, unforgettable character in Lacey Brennan, who, after a five-year quest for love and belonging, finds she must live in the moment in order to understand her past and face her future.

Deirdre Shaw's fiction has appeared in Folio and Swink, and her nonfiction in The New York Times and The New York Observer. She has held fiction residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her fiction was included in the New Short Fiction Series Emerging Voices Group Show in L.A. in 2005, and she was awarded a 2004 Hackney Literary Award for National Short Story.

She grew up in New York and was a newspaper journalist for several years at The Keene (N.H.) Sentinel and The Philadelphia Inquirer before moving to Los Angeles, where she has written for television.

Photo by John Li.