Antiquer Abby Randolph has had a string of bad luck -- her mother and her mother's lover die in a freak earthquake accident while visiting India; her live-in boyfriend Clyde takes off with another woman; her booth at the flea market is full of junk and empty of customers. Aging, alone and living in a tiny apartment in Cambridge, life seems to have come to a standstill.
On a hunch, her boothmate Gus suggests that the chamber pot she inherited from her mother and has been using as a trashcan might be a priceless antique. Abby packs her pot and takes it on Antiques Roadshow. Turns out the chamber pot belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and is appraised at $75,000. With this sudden windfall, life seems to be turning around for Abby -- that is until her kinda-sister-in- law makes a claim that it really was intended for her. Lawsuits ensue and Abby tries to deal as ghosts from her past keep revisiting her in the form of ex-boyfriends. Just when Abby is pretty sure she can't bottom out any further, a handsome young reporter takes an interest in her story and promises her great publicity with the possibility of more. Could this be a diamond in the rough, or just another pile of trash pretending to be treasure?
Despite a slow start, this is a delightfully lighthearted account of a woman trying to find love after a series of losses. With the peppering of literary references and witty turns of phrase, Mameve Medwed has written a story any antique lover or flea market maven will enjoy.
What do a chamber pot, a famous poet, a family feud, and a long-ago suitor all have in common? In this delicious laugh-out-loud new novel of love and loss, rivalry and reconciliation, treasure and trash, by acclaimed author Mameve Medwed (Mail, The End of an Error), we see what happens when past and present collide. . . .
Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have written about the length and breadth of love, but Abby Randolph has given up on all that, preferring to spend her time between her cluttered "needs work" apartment and the overcrowded antiques mart -- the optimistically named Objects of Desire. Yet Abby can't help but wonder what happened to her earlier passionate self who rejected the path set out for her, dropping out of Harvard and falling headfirst into an ill-fated love affair. . . .
Then the Antiques Roadshow comes to town, and Abby turns up at the crack of dawn, artifact in hand, standing alongside thousands of Boston's hopefuls. But there, among the carousel horses, pipe sets, potbellied stoves, and bedraggled stuffed animals, it is Abby's rather ordinary -- and squalid -- piece of porcelain that gets the star treatment.
Abby is barely able to enjoy her good news, for the moment the show airs, life comes back at her at full force. Everything changes: friendship, finances, family, love affairs, career, her view of others, and the way she sees herself.
With this, her fourth novel, Medwed once again returns to Cambridge and, in her "sardonic, funny voice" (Chicago Tribune), "homes in on the rarified self-important atmosphere of our Ivy League institutions -- and the reflected snobbishness of the people who serve them" (New York Times Book Review).
This novel is a gift to anyone who goes to a flea market or watches Antiques Roadshow, anyone who has ever defied expectations, or, especially, anyone who has never been able to extinguish an old flame.
© 2003-2026