Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel

The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life. In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other's lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.

Sherrie Flick is the author of the award-winning flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward and New Sudden Fiction. A recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, she works in Pittsburgh as a freelance writer and artistic director for the Gist Street Reading Series.