So Says the Naked Lady in the Bathhouse

I wrote most of these stories in my thirties, when my marriage was young, I was raising two children, and I commuted 30 miles to work from my house in the country. I felt ill-equipped and incompetent at that triple threat of roles—wife, mother, employee—and the stories flowed from my sense of feeling trapped and powerless. Several stories, as I read them now, seem to be meditations on problems I saw coming or wanted to avoid. The characters nudged me to describe their worlds in the most emotionally intelligent way I could. Midway in the book is a quiet interlude that I wrote for my 40th birthday party invitation. The final story in the collection burst forth six years after I connected the dots in a revelation about something that happened in 2013. Enjoy this varied and energetic collection. –Dana Frank