Friends at Forty — Angie Dickerson

"If our love life was a dishwasher, we could fix it." This is a tale of fine dining, Zen masters, Magic 8-Balls and the inexplicable bond that holds a marriage together even as it ruptures at the seams: friendship. What if you had the opportunity to reinvent yourself after a lifetime shackled to parenthood but didn't know what you wanted or even who you were? When empty nesters, Samantha and Daniel Blake, move into their loft in L.A.'s hip Historic Core it is in search of a new lifestyle-an attempt to stabilize their erratic marriage weighed down by decades of spousal congeniality and exhaustive parenting. But when new alliances surface, tensions mount as the couple is tested by an overdose of their "new normal." Samantha is finally pushed to make her most difficult choice: will she have the strength to sacrifice her marriage to find herself or will she continue to trail aimlessly behind Daniel and live an uninspired life? Angie Dickerson has been a literature and creative writing teacher for fourteen years and has recently been demoted to the role of empty nester. Her novel is for anyone who's ever been lost and felt the need to find themselves again.