I wrapped up my grandmother's tea cup collection and my
mother's china, then grabbed a violin I'd hidden way back in
my closet that made me cry, a gold necklace with a dolphin
that my father gave me two weeks before he died of a heart
attack when I was twelve and, at midnight, with that moon as
bright as the blazes, I left Chicago. When Jeanne Stewart
stops at The Opera Man's Cafe in Weltana, Oregon, to eat
pancakes for the first time in twelve years, she has no idea
she's also about to order up a whole new future. It's been
barely a week since she succumbed to a spectacularly public
nervous breakdown in front of hundreds of the nation's most
important advertising and PR people. Jeanne certainly had
her reasons--her mother's recent death, the discovery that
her boyfriend had been sleeping with a dozen other women,
and the assault charges that resulted when Jeanne retaliated
in a creative way against him, involving condoms and peanut
oil.
Now, en route to her brother's house in
Portland, Jeanne impulsively decides to spend some time in
picturesque Weltana. Staying at a B&B run by the eccentric,
endearing Rosvita, she meets a circle of quirky new friends
at her court-ordered Anger Management classes. Like Jeanne,
all of them are trying to become better, braver versions of
themselves. Yet the most surprising discoveries are still to
come--a good man who steadily makes his way into her heart
and a dilapidated house that with love and care might be
transformed into something wholly her own, just like the new
life she is slowly building, piece by piece.
As
heartfelt as it is hilarious, The Last Time I Was Me is a
warm, wise novel about breaking down, opening up, and
finally letting go of everything we thought we should be, in
order to claim the life that has been waiting all along.
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