Meet author Maribeth Fischer, author of A Season of Perfect Happiness on Thursday, August 22nd at 6pm!
About Maribeth:
Maribeth Fischer is the author of three novels, The Language of Goodbye (Dutton, 2001), The Life You Longed For (Simon & Schuster, 2007), and A Season of Perfect Happiness (Dutton, forthcoming August 2024). Her books have been sold in the UK as well as Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal.
Fischer has received three Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowships for fiction and nonfiction, has published essays in such journals as The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, Creative Nonfiction and Fourth Genre, and has received two Pushcart Prizes for her essays: “Stillborn” (1994) and “The Fiction Writer” (2014). Her essays have been mentioned twice as “notable essays” in Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays series.
Maribeth founded the Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild (RBWG) in 2004, where she currently serves as Executive Director. She teaches classes for the guild in both novel writing and creative nonfiction.
She lives in Lewes, Delaware, with her husband, Victor Letonoff, a police officer and writer.
A Season of Perfect Happiness
A Season of Perfect Happiness fundamentally questions what makes a “good” mother, with a propulsive and beautifully heartrending portrayal of one woman’s efforts to find her voice.
Ten years after an unspeakable tragedy caused Claire to flee her hometown in Delaware, she finally feels content. She has a quiet, tidy life in Wisconsin, a place she picked at random for its perfect pink mitten shape on a map. Her carefully constructed identity is predicated on a simple plan: Keep her social circle small, and keep the past a secret.
But when she meets Erik—a lighthearted theater nerd who gives Claire more of a chance than she’s given herself in a long time—that plan seems increasingly impossible, especially after she finds herself emotionally entangled not only with Erik, but with his ex-wife, Annabelle, their three young children, and a small set of friends, the kind she’d always wanted to have around her. Life after the accident can be full of joy, Claire realizes—going on a date to see a thousand-pound pig at the state fair, giggling over obscure inside jokes with friends at a music gig, making smoothies while the kids wear their infamous cooking hats. Being a partner, a best friend, a mother.
It's only when a person from her past arrives that Claire finds herself forced to confront what happened all those years ago. And as her past becomes known in her present, her new life—and the deep friendships she’s made—hang in the balance. If Claire chooses to confide in the people she’s grown to love, will they be able to forgive her? Will she finally forgive herself? Or will everything she has spent the last decade working towards fall apart?