Available: A Very Honest Account of Life After Divorce

by Laura Friedman Williams

Overview

‘Gripping’ Vogue
‘Empowering’ Cosmopolitan
‘Joyful’ Financial Times
‘Eye-popping’ Daily Mail

When her 22-year-marriage suddenly ended, 47-year-old mother of three Laura expected life as she knew it to be over. What she hadn’t expected:

· An incredible one-night stand
· A new-found sexual appetite
· Ten men in eight months
· That there is plenty of fun to be had after 40
From G-spots to bald spots, dirty talk to dating fiascos, Available is the unflinchingly honest, empowering, and humorous true story of one woman’s love life after divorce.

‘A real page-turner […] Unexpected, original, funny and sometimes deeply infuriating, Laura Friedman Williams has so much to say about what we expect of women’s sexuality. I loved it’ Viv Groskop author of How to Own the Room

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780008395933
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	640,609
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Laura Friedman Williams is a native New Yorker whose writing credits consist of countless PTA newsletters and program notes for talent shows and school auctions, as well as ghostwritten bar mitzvah speeches for many of her friends. Her wit and wisdom have not yet made it to a larger audience, but her years spent raising children and running events at her children’s schools have kept her writing steady and sharp. She credits her degree in English from Washington University and the ten formative years she spent in book publishing – first in Subsidiary Rights at Warner Books (now Grand Central Publishing) and then at Henry Holt & Company, then as a book scout and finally as a literary agent – for giving her a deep love and respect for the written word. She credits the break-up of her marriage for finally giving her the subject matter about which she both needed and wanted to write. She lives in downtown Manhattan with her three children.

Editorial Reviews

03/07/2022

In this heartwarming and humorous debut, Williams lays bare her painful divorce at age 47 and subsequent dating adventures—from the good to the mind-blowingly bad. After 27 years and three children together, Williams, a “stay-home PTA mom,” and her husband’s marriage was upended in 2018 when she discovered he was having an affair with a woman 20 years her junior. When her husband admitted he cheated “to get out of our marriage,” she divorced him and entered the daunting dating pool of New York City, her trip through the waters of singledom and sex playfully dubbed by a suitor as Laura’s Liberation Tour. Archly referring to her partners by number, she recounts trying out Tinder, finding her “mojo” via a series of sexual hijinks (“one-night stand with #1, my debacle with #2, my summer flings with #3 and #4, the disaster that #5 has turned out to be”), and encountering revelations of empowerment along the way: “it’s possible to have it all, if only you’re flexible about what that actually means.” Rendered in her wry prose, Williams’s candid confessions about middle-aged dating and tender takes on redefining motherhood postdivorce—“I can be a mother and a fulfilled woman... the two are not mutually exclusive”—are worth lingering over. Sex in the city gets refreshingly real in this charming work. (May)

Publishers Weekly

‘Gripping’ Vogue

‘Empowering and funny’ Cosmopolitan

‘Joyful’ Financial Times

‘An eye-popping adventure’ Daily Mail

‘This memoir is a real page-turner. What happens when you start dating after 22 years of marriage? Unexpected, original, funny and sometimes deeply infuriating, Laura Friedman Williams has so much to say about what we expect of women’s sexuality. Confronting without being sleazy and intelligent without being preachy. I loved it’ Viv Groskop author of, How to Own the Room

‘AVAILABLE offers far more than just a wild romp through the Wild West of the post-marital dating world – though a wild romp it certainly is. Curling up with this memoir is like settling in for a night with a hilarious girlfriend, listening to her best sexual anecdotes. AVAILABLE is also a serious exploration of womanhood. Laura reminds us of the importance of regaining all the parts of who we are as women, despite how easy it is to become consumed by the mammoth roles of Mother and Wife. We aren't here solely to serve our families as domestic martyrs. We deserve to reawaken the parts of ourselves that often become dormant once we enter maternal roles. We deserve to live life to the fullest, embracing each facet of our identities, even (especially!) the parts society teaches us to shove aside when we become mothers’ Caroline Mackenzie, author of One Year of Ugly

From the Publisher