Sometimes you don’t blow up your own mid-life. Sometimes, life blows it up for you. And sometimes…that makes you want things you shouldn’t want.

WE ARE FINE
by Gretchen Lieberum
Cardinal/Hachette US, TBD 2028
(via The Gernert Company)

Sarah is a middle-aged, married LA props stylist—wife to reliable Charlie (giver of excellent bear-hugs and perpetrator of just one teensy, immediately regretted affair); mother to ethereal Gracie (fourteen years old, hilarious and still poignantly becoming). Give Sarah a few more years and she might round the corner to a proper mid-life crisis, exploding the first stable family she’s ever known in search of something forever on the tip of her tongue. But woman flails and the universe laughs; Sarah, it turns out, might not have a few more years. 

WE ARE FINE spins life-affirming comedy from tragedy in this tenderly off-kilter, hot and bothered novel about a married woman who has a bomb go off in her life in the form of a possibly terminal diagnosis. Instead of informing her husband and daughter, Sarah drives east into the Mojave desert as she runs from an uncertain future and toward an unexpected journey of self-discovery, reckoning, and most pressingly, reconnection with her decades long, sexually explosive situationship, the charismatic JP, who’s never quite let Sarah go…

Alternating between Sarah’s present and key moments from her past that flash before our eyes like the best kind of Greatest Hits album, WE ARE FINE is singer-songwriter Gretchen Lieberum’s propulsive, darkly comic, emotionally honest embrace of a novel about life and death, grief and lust, limerence and the true meaning of love.

Gretchen Lieberum is a Los Angeles based singer-songwriter. In 2013, she co-founded Prince tribute band Princess with actress-comedian and SNL alumni Maya Rudolph, performing everywhere from the Hollywood Bowl, to Carnegie Hall along with D’Angelo and Elvis Costello, to the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. In addition to playing with Princess, Gretchen has written and recorded four albums of original music, both independently and with the support of Lakeshore Records in the US and Nomadic records in the UK. Gretchen’s latest project, an album of reimagined jazz and pop standards titled “This May Only Be A Dream,” was produced by BAFTA award winning composer and musician Keefus Ciancia (True Detective, Killing Eve). Gretchen graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in American Literature. She is a married mom of two and a breast cancer survivor.