how to turn screwing up into an art form

Nell Stevens had it all. After moving to America to take an editing job, she fell in love. She moved to California, opened a bookstore/café with her boyfriend, and then he asked her to marry him. While most of her friends from school were still back in London, she was making new friends in L.A. and loving her life.

Until she wasn’t.

It only took about six months to go from happy to alone, unemployed, and living in a rented room back in London. When the business failed, the relationship fell apart, and Nell headed back to England to be with her friends and her parents, and to try to figure out what to do next.

But it turns out that going home isn’t so easy. Nell’s parents have turned her bedroom into a short-term rental. Her friends are all married, with kids and big houses and jobs and new friends and intense lives. Just finding a time for them all to meet up for Nell’s birthday takes dozens of texts, and even then they have to go to an Italian restaurant that has a play area for the kids. She’s renting a bedroom from Edward, a man who spends his weekends with his wife and kids at their place in the country, and who is charging an exceptionally good rate on the rent in exchange for help feeding and walking his dog Arthur. And the only job she can find is to freelance writing obituaries.

Nell is lonely, broke, single, and feels like a first-rate screwup. But she’s tired of all the motivational quotes coming across her social media feeds, and all the influencers making green juice in their perfect kitchens, and she just wants to be real. So she starts a podcast. She tells it like it is, reveals how she’s really feeling, in her Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up.

As she builds her new life with her single room, the love of Arthur, arguments with her landlord over the types of plastic that can be recycled and added to the bin, being a godparent and last-minute babysitter, and flirting with the hot guy who posed naked in the art class she took, Nell starts to find her way past her pain and learn to live again. She makes friends with Cricket, the widow of the playwright she wrote about in her first obituary. She tries online dating. She decides to be happy for her brother when he announces his engagement and that they’re having a baby. And she leans into her gratitude journal.

And when the podcast starts to pick up steam (14 downloads!), and when her first date with the hot guy from art class turns into a second and a third, and when she encourages Cricket to start a little free library in her community, Nell feels some hope for her future after all. But the truth is, life rarely turns out how you plan, and sometimes all you can do it be in the moment, be grateful for the little things, and laugh about everything you can.

Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up is as honest a portrayal of life as I’ve read in quite some time. It is encouraging and revealing, hilarious and embarrassing, honest and moving, and while it will tear you apart in places, it will put you back together too. The basis for ABC’s popular Not Dead Yet, this novel by Alexandra Potter is an absolute delight in ever way.

I will admit I have not watched the television show, but I am now on the Alexandra Potter bandwagon and will be reading everything of hers I can find. As a writer, she is generous and warm and funny and smart, and I want more. I loved every page of Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up, and I think anyone who picks up the book and reads a short excerpt will also get hooked. This is one not to miss!

Egalleys for Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up were provided by Harper Perennial through NetGalley, with many thanks.