Louise Marburg‘s debut novel, Fancy Meeting You, follows Laura Harrigan, a middle-aged woman whose life is built on a foundation of carefully crafted lies. Depending on the audience, Laura is a psychiatrist, a business consultant, or the mother of Yale-bound twins, but in reality she’s single, childless, underemployed, and spending many of her evenings at a Baltimore dive bar. Over the course of her fiftieth year, Laura navigates awkward family gatherings, questionable romances, and unexpected friendships, forcing her to reckon with who she is beneath the stories she tells. Funny, sharp, and unsentimental, the novel offers a fresh take on midlife reinvention through a heroine who is neither seeking marriage nor motherhood, but her own version of fulfillment.
Marburg is an acclaimed short story writer whose previous collection received reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. At age sixty-five, Fancy Meeting You marks her debut novel.
We asked Marburg to answer our recurring My Reading Life series so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
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