Girl Meets Boy

A friend of mine, Cathy Day, wrote an amazing books (two amazing books really), her first "The Circus in Winter" was a finalist for the Story Prize, The Great Lakes Book Award and the GLCA Book Award, you can read about it in an old post of mine. Her second book, "Comeback Season: How I learned to Play the Game of Love" published in 2008. Essentially, this is a book about trying to meet "Mr. Right" in Pittsburgh, where there aren't many single men in their 30s period and fewer still can handle dating a woman with a PhD and a novel. It's sensitive, full of raw emotion and brave confessions, but it's also wickedly funny. I am not going to spoil the book for you. Imagine discussing your match.com options with a mother who's as sweetly innocent as the mother from Bobby's World. Or having to repeatedly explain to your dad why "but we love you honey" just isn't enough. The reason it's called "Comeback Season" is because at 38, Cathy, a single professor and writer, was hoping to make a comeback, just like her favorite football team The Colts. As they trained, she trained, quitting smoking, interviewing the happily married types, watching Sex and the City, taking notes. As she was writing and dating, everybody, her friends, her agent, her family and especially Cathy's publisher (readers want a happy ending) were all rooting for her.

I won't give it all away. The book ends on a happy note, a confident note. And perhaps that is what made this last twist possible. (I hope this gets written into the back pages of future books.) While Cathy was on her book tour she did a few radio interviews, and a man she'd known in college but lost touch with was listening. He had been sent her book while he was teaching in China. His name is Eric. He googled Cathy and emailed her. They talked. They met. In October he moved to Pittsburgh. They are getting married this June. The rest is history.