screenshot196I like some Chick Lit, or lighter women’s fiction. It’s usually an entertaining read, and sometimes you gain some insight from the story.  In my experience, though, once you pass a certain age, a lot of  this genre begins to lose it’s appeal because you’ve been through the twenty-something angst and  your issues and concerns are different now.  Or you’ve figured out that you’re not like all the chick lit heroines who find their perfect guy by the time they are thirty, or even thirty five. You just want to read about someone more like YOU and it’s harder to find in the genre than the younger heroines. That’s why, for me, Meredith Schorr’s new release, How Do You Know?  is a fitting read.

From the publisher’s summary:

What if you were approaching the end of your thirties and all of the life milestones you took for granted in your youth suddenly seemed out of reach? On the eve of her 39th birthday, Maggie Piper doesn’t look, act, or feel much different than she did at 29, but with her 40th birthday speeding towards her like a freight train, she wonders if she should. The fear of a slowing metabolism, wrinkling of her skin, and the ticking of her biological clock leaves Maggie torn between a desire to settle down like most of her similarly-aged peers and concern that all is not perfect in her existing relationship. When a spontaneous request for a temporary “break” from her live-in boyfriend results in a “break-up”, Maggie finds herself single once again and only twelve months from the big 4.0. In the profound yet bumpy year that follows, Maggie will learn, sometimes painfully, that life doesn’t always happen on a schedule, there are no deadlines in love, and age really is just a number.

One of the most frequent conversations my girl friends and I have about relationships is about the “spark”. We all recognize that the initial electricity fades a bit, or morphs into something more solid and stronger as a real relationship grows.  But we’re all so inundated with drama from the Real Housewives of insert-city-here, and Sex and the City re-runs, and The Bachelor/Bachelorette, and every romantic comedy ever that sometimes it’s hard to believe that a lack of drama is not a lack of passion.  It’s that very dilemma that sets up How Do  You Know?.

What Schorr does really well in this story is show how no relationship is perfect.   No one ever really knows what is going on behind closed doors. That sometimes, a fear of rejection can be paralyzing in moving forward in a relationship- or even starting to move forward at all. That indeed, the grass is not always greener anywhere else.

Schorr also provides dynamic characters who do what the best of friends are supposed to do: Support you, but challenge you, too. Maggie’s friends are able to hold a mirror to her, force her to answer some tough questions about her perceptions and decisions.

But the thing I LOVED about this book is Schorr’s premise that age really is just a number.  It’s something I’m trying to remind myself of as I choke on saying my age out loud.  Because the premise of the book hits close to home.  I always thought my life was going to turn out a particular way.  I’d get married at a certain age, have kids at a certain age.  And it hasn’t happened.  My life is so very different from many of my peers, and it is sometimes a challenge being completely content in what is, overall, a pretty awesome life, even if it doesn’t conform to what nearly every pop culture and societal conception says it should be at this age.

Real characters, real emotions, real dilemmas.  Schorr continues to deliver authenticity while at the same time telling an entertaining story.