From Beer to Maternity

For Maggie Lamond Simone, sarcasm was always a means of survival and words her weapon of choice. Her second-grade teacher worried about a child so flippant at such a tender age. Twenty years later, as a police officer escorted a drunken Simone away from the car she had just wrecked, she asked him to drop her not at home but at the bar where her friends waited. He didn't laugh and she quit drinking the next day. When she finally came up for air a few years later, she was afraid that she wouldn't be funny without the alcohol, but had a startling revelation: she wasn't funny in the first place—the world was. So she started writing about it. This collection of her columns and essays addresses dating, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause with a caustic wit and a healthy disrespect for perfection.