Easy Street
A Story of Redemption from Myself
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A moving and offbeat story of unlikely friendship, the cost of ambition, and what happens when the things you’ve always run away from show up on your doorstep.
To most, Maggie Rowe appears to live on Easy Street. Her stylish home is in a fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood. She has a kind husband who makes her laugh. And after years of struggle, she is finally making a name for herself in Hollywood. But the agreeable, confident persona she presents to the world often feels like a deception to Maggie, who’s long grappled with mental illness and feelings of inadequacy.
Enter Joanna Hergert, a neurodiverse middle-aged woman who lives with her elderly mother. Maggie’s husband, Jim, introduces her to the pair after meeting them at a local charbroiled chicken franchise. Over the next several years, she forms a friendship with Joanna and her mother—despite Joanna’s robust romantic fixation on Jim. What begins as a mild curiosity soon blooms into a complicated and intimate friendship that will challenge Maggie to confront her mental health issues and the trade-offs she’s made to live life on her own terms.
Engrossing, moving, and wickedly funny, Easy Street is a midlife coming-of-age buddy comedy about embracing the strength of the families we fashion, finding peace with the choices we make, and, above all, learning to be compassionate with ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rowe (Sin Bravely), actor and television writer for shows including Arrested Development, proves that things aren't always as they seem in this funny and touching memoir. Despite her happy marriage, successful career, and life on "a smooth road lined with jasmine" in L.A., she admits she's had a bumpy run "beset by envy and petty rivalries of all kinds." Plagued by her inner critic and battles with OCD, she relates how she came to resent anyone who had what she lacked—from Krista Tippett, host of NPR's On Being ("Boy, did she play her cards right") to even "wise old women on their deathbeds." But those feelings took a turn when Rowe's husband, former Golden Girls writer Jim Vallely, introduced her to Sunny and Joanna, a mother-daughter panhandling team who later became their close friends. While Rowe was initially skeptical of them, she traces how letting them in led to an intimate, at times tumultuous, relationship that began with a Golden Girls marathon and stretched over years and holidays singing ABBA's "Dancing Queen." Eventually, their company led her to feel a fragile but real sense of contentment. Rowe's bluntness about her mental health struggles, combined with her account of her imperfect but enduring dedication to Sunny and Joanna, makes for a heartstring-tugging and charming story. Readers will find it hard to put this one down.
