Amalie in Orbit

Amalie Price—overeducated, sharp-tongued, and slightly cross-eyed—has been coasting along in New York as a sheltered faculty wife who secretly freelances as a French porno translator, when she suddenly finds herself a widow at 40. Left with no financial resources by her activist—and possibly unfaithful—husband, she must contend with her newly alienated teenage son, the threat of eviction from her Upper West Side apartment, and the need to earn a living. Amalie transforms herself in record time as she takes on the New York City bureaucracy, leads a tenant protest, and becomes increasingly engaged in social issues, to her own surprise and the amazement of both her inscrutable son and wacky sociologist father. Along the way, Amalie manages a new job, attempts to make peace with her offspring, and fights off—or succumbs to—a colorful variety of men in hot pursuit: a composer who bases his music on cuts of meat, her messianic new boss, and a lawyer who relies on his dog for legal strategy. Set in the late 1980s, Amalie in Orbit is an insightful and hilarious tale of one woman's miraculous conversion.