The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life.

 

In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other’s lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.

Sherrie Flick is the author of the award-winning flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward and New Sudden Fiction. A recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, she works in Pittsburgh as a freelance writer and artistic director for the Gist Street Reading Series.

"In her descriptions of food, the Nebraskan landscape, and the rhythms of work at a tourist town bakery, Flick indulges in sensual detail with pleasurable results."—Publishers Weekly

"Alternating between time and perspectives, and spanning the two coasts, this introspective, conversational, travelogue-like novel captures the pensive force driving the two women's personal journeys, and how the women are illuminated by sparks of reconciliation along the way."—Leah Strauss, Booklist

"Inviting, warm, rich and complex."—Sherri Hallgren, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Reconsidering Happiness is a courageously intimate novel about the young women of modern America, their friendships, their betrayals, and their anxious cravings for everything from sex to pastry.”—Jim Crace, author of Being Dead and The Pesthouse

“Reading Sherrie Flick’s big beautiful Buick of a book is like taking a road-trip through that landscape we call life. It is full of feeling and caring, passion and pain, every page rich with illuminating surprises of timing and grace. My best advice is to drive this book slowly, savoring its passage.”—Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale

“A feast of love, lust, longing, loneliness, and home-made baked goods—but most of all it’s a mouth-watering, yeasty feast of language. A fresh, hip, witty, and poignant novel peopled with a quirky and appealing cast of characters.”—Marly Swick, author of The Summer Before the Summer of Love and Evening News