For fans of Less and Remarkably Bright Creatures comes a funny and moving novel about love, loss, and new beginnings found on an unlikely road trip
Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She’s mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara’s prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara’s possessions. She’s fine.
But in going through Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers her friend’s last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda’s upcoming seventieth birthday. So, with Sara’s urn in tow, Magda decides to hit the road, crossing the country and encountering a cast of memorable characters—including her sister, from whom she’s been keeping secrets. Along the way she stumbles upon a jazz funeral in New Orleans and a hilarious women’s retreat meant to “unleash one’s divine feminine energy” in Texas, and meets a woman who challenges her conceptions of herself—and the hidden truths about her friendship with Sara.
As the trip shakes up her careful routines, Magda finally faces longings she locked away years ago and confronts questions about her sexuality and identity she thought she had long put to rest. And as she soon learns, it’s never too late to start your next journey.
"For fans of Less comes a wry, moving novel about love, loss, and new beginnings found on an unlikely road trip. Most days, Magda is fine. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits, and her longtime colleagues Boomer and Theo, whose playful bickering she mediates. She successfully avoids all discussion of her upcoming 70th birthday and has even brokered a tentative truce with her late best friend Sara's widower, Fred. Magda has her routines. She has other people's lives to fix. She's fine. But when Fred gifts her Sara's journal, she discovers plans for the road trip they always meant to take scribbled inside. And when Fred foists Sara's urn on Magda for the summer, there seems no choice but to go, lugging Sara along for the ride. Magda just wants closure, but the trip has the potential to shake up her careful routines, and the longing she locked away years ago. Because sometimes getting away from it all makes us confront the things we refuse to face. A hilarious and touching meditation on loss, aging, and the boundless power of female friendship, HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL, MAGDA EKLUND? shows how love endures past death, and how it's never too late to start your next journey"--
