Nancy’s Theory of Style
by Grace Coopersmith
Paperback
List Price: $15.00
Publication Date: 2010-05-18
ISBN-10: 1-4165-9886-3

Grace Coopersmith guest post:

I’m very excited that my romantic comedy, Nancy’s Theory of Style, will be released next week. I’m primarily a humorist, and I sometimes treat myself like one of my characters. Like my heroine, Nancy Carrington-Chambers, I say things that I think are amusing or entertaining and encourage a certain eccentric idea of who I am. All right, I confess, I am eccentric!

But the truth is that I take writing humorous fiction very seriously and I’ve worked at both writing and humor ever since I learned the alphabet. I recall being chosen to tell a funny story in first grade. When my classmates burst into laughter, I felt both amazement and delight. I still get that delicious feeling when readers tell me they laughed out loud at something I wrote. There’s a connection there, a shared understanding of the human condition when we laugh together.

My character, Nancy, is the girl you love to hate. She’s pretty, privileged, judgmental, and self-centered. She separates from her increasingly boorish husband to work on her event planning company, Froth. She leaves their horrible McMansion in a half-abandoned development and returns to her chic bachelorette apartment in San Francisco’s posh Pacific Heights.

The very first thing she does is hire an assistant to help her resurrect one of the city’s most venerated fundraisers. Her assistant, Derek, is impeccably dressed, British, gorgeous, and gay. Things are going well, when Nancy’s irresponsible cousin abandons her four-year-old in Nancy’s care. Somehow, Nancy, her assistant, and the child begin to forge a sort of family.

Nancy begins to let go of the tight control she’s had on the details of her life. Little by little we learn that Nancy’s life has not been the “lovely, lovely” image she projects. It’s more like a beautiful piece of glass that has a slight crack. The crack is only visible when you hold the glass to the light, but it’s enough to make the glass much more fragile than it appears to be.

When Derek asks Nancy why she puts on parties, she says, “Something magical happens when the ambience is right and people are celebrating. It’s momentary and elusive, but as glorious as a butterfly. I want to think that creating that shared joy is important.”

And that’s why I love writing stories that make people laugh and feel happy – I want to think that creating a shared joy is important.

About the author (from the author’s site):

I’m a San Francisco Bay Area native and still live there. I went to Stanford, where I studied creative writing, literature, and theatre. (I had a mad idea that I wanted to be a theatre reviewer. Anyway…)

With this extremely useful ability to sit around and read books and talk about them, I took miscellaneous low-paying jobs. I frequently worked for non-profits, including theatre companies. One of my job skills was properly opening a bottle of champagne for special guests. I can’t remember if I put that on my resume.

I was a frequent contributor of home, gardening, and style columns and features for newspapers and magazines. So, yes, I have written in-depth articles about modern wallpaper trends, worm composting, and luxury home libraries.

Right now, I’m working on another novel set in San Francisco.

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Tags: Ayelet Gruenspecht, Grace Coopersmith