Melanie Gideon discusses and signs The Slippery Year August 19, 2009

“We are all so curious. Hungry for the truth. If only we could ask the questions we really want to ask of each other and get the real answers. Like how many times a month do you have sex? What prescription drugs are you on? Are you happy? Really happy? Happy enough?”

For anybody who has ever wondered privately Is this all there is, Melanie Gideon’s poignant, hilarious, exuberant meditation, The Slippery Year, chronicles a year in which she confronts both the fantasies of her receding youth and the realities of midlife with a husband, a child, and a dog (one of whom runs away). She reflects on the exigencies of domesticity—the need for a household catastrophe plan, the fainting spell occasioned by the departure of her nine-year-old son for camp, the mattress wars, and the carpool line. With tenderness, unsparing honesty, and uproarious wit, Gideon brings us back again and again to the sweetness of ordinary pleasures and to life’s most enduring satisfactions. She captures perfectly that moment right before everything changes and the things we have loved forever begin to fall away for the first time.

The Slippery Year is the story of a woman’s quest to reignite passion, beauty, and mystery and discover if “happily ever after” is a possibility after all.

“Ever wonder what’s running through your wife’s mind? Read The Slippery Year. Gideon has an utterly charming way of turning the constant compromises of married life into riotous poetic insight.”
—Po Bronson, author of NutureShock

“In this marvelous memoir Ms. Gideon appears to be channeling everything I’ve ever felt, thought, feared, hoped about motherhood.”

—Ayelet Waldman author of Bad Mother, a Chronicle of Maternal Crimes Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace

Official Website: http://www.keplers.com