Screenwriter Dixon’s second character-driven novel focuses on three women, their lives mysteriously intertwined over several decades.
Livvi Gray lives in contemporary Los Angeles and has just published her first novel, The Book of Someday¸ which is based on her own loveless childhood spent with an emotionally scarred father and his second wife, Livvi’s cold, enigmatic stepmother. Her father has remained a distant figure—both physically and emotionally—in her life for as long as she can remember. Now, at 26, Livvi rarely sees or hears from him, and actually feels as if she has no family at all. Her affair with a married man is leading nowhere, and only exacerbates her feelings of loneliness and self-doubt.
Micah Lesser is a sought-after New York City photographer, recently diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She’s now on a mission to find those she’s betrayed over her lifetime—including her best friend in college, whose budding photographic career she sabotaged, and the fiancé she left at the altar many years earlier, abruptly deciding marriage would only hinder her own career. She’s hoping to gain their forgiveness, even at this late date in their lives.
AnnaLee is a young housewife living on Long Island in the 1980s. She and her husband Jack and their young daughter live in her parents’ mansion, which AnnaLee inherited when they died. AnnaLee loves Jack deeply but can’t contain her resentment about his inability to commit himself to his profession—first as a trauma surgeon, then as a lawyer—satisfied to get by on her income and his part-time salary at a small law firm.
Dixon’s story is told in the alternating voices of these three women, whose lives are gradually shown to intersect in intricate and highly improbable ways, as if the author had to struggle to somehow weave their pasts together. Her characters are compelling, however, and the reader quickly becomes enmeshed in each woman’s attempt to make the best out of her changing circumstances, which should appeal to readers of contemporary authors like Kristin Hannah and Luanne Rice.
