Books

Have you ever asked yourself: Who am I? What am I doing with my life?  And where am I going?

After following her self-absorbed boyfriend to a small town in central Minnesota,  writer’s block strikes in Marcy Hunt’s almost perfect life. Hoping a change of scene  will help her to meet her now-urgent deadline, the 33-year-old New Yorker heads  out on her own to Miami Beach.

Before becoming a writer, she had a promising law career; now she faces the  challenge of building a new living from scratch. While confiding non-stop to her  secret online psychoanalyst, she will do whatever it takes to convince her friends,  her boyfriend and mainly herself that she’s not a loser.

Not only does she get involved in hilarious adventures with Daniel, the stingy next-  door neighbor who is all too ready to poke fun at her, she also gets tangled up in a  murder case at Splendor Condo where her amateur investigation feeds her crippled literary inspiration. She attends lavish parties with Veronica, her gorgeous Colombian friend who lives the fairy tale life she yearns for; of course, appearances can be deceiving. At one of the parties she meets Xavier, a sexy young Catalan with whom she is terrified of falling in love; and later in La pequeña Habana they share a sensual dance–or perhaps, more than that. Later, in Fort Lauderdale, Marcy encounters Sharon, a talkative old painter who reveals a mystery and encourages her to explore her true reason for becoming a writer.

Between the eventful ups and downs of her life, when she least expects it, a great physical danger arouses her hidden miseries and awakens her for the first time to wonder who she is, what she’s doing, and where she’s going. With the help of an offbeat Chinese doctor, Marcy starts out answering these questions and behaving accordingly. Through the painful quest for her own Holy Grail she discovers that the happiness and freedom she’s been seeking outside herself actually comes from within.

A story may offer different interpretations, even with several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings. As in Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta’s story in Dante’s Divine Comedy, this story is not about unfaithfulness either. This story is about infatuation: what burns inside of oneself when we let ourselves fall madly for someone.