I wrote my latest women’s fiction novel featuring five point-of-view characters–three women and two men–in part for my late sister, Ellen Vartanoff. It’s not the story of her life or anything like that. She died of cancer in 2019 but before that awfulness had the great pleasure of taking a trip to see the total solar eclipse of 2017. Ellen’s enthusiastic descriptions of the details are embedded in this novel. I only wish I could have used some of the beautiful, arty black-and-white photos she took on the book’s cover, but I wanted an upbeat-looking image and eclipses are by nature an experience of darkness. Kind of like cancer, I guess.
Anyway, this story follows a handful of Baby Boomers at age sixty-five after most of them have lived through cancer. These days, a lot of us have brushes with cancer or other life-threatening illness or events and come out the other side. That’s when we realize that life is too short to be constricted or made unhappy by prior notions of how we should behave. That’s when we decide that life is too short to hold toxic grudges, or to tolerate unkindness towards ourselves, or to not reach out for new happiness in whatever form it may take.
Cue the upbeat ending music.
Life Is Too Short is available in ebook and print editions at all major ebookstores. Click here to find it on Amazon.
