I am seeking representation for HELEN OF BOSTON, a 70,000-word novel about a woman who starts her life over at an age when most people assume one’s story is already written. Set against a wedding, a marriage separation, an unexpected diagnosis, and a past she has never fully faced, HELEN OF BOSTON is a coming-of-age story, only at middle age.

At forty-nine, Helen Kersey has built a life that looks enviable from the outside: a twenty-five-year marriage, a beautiful home in Boston, and financial security. In private, it’s unraveling. Her husband is having an affair and Helen, accustomed to keeping the peace at any cost, has yet to confront him about it. When a cancer diagnosis makes avoidance no longer possible, she begins to question not only her marriage, but what happened to the life she imagined for herself when she was younger. A trip to San Francisco for a college friend’s wedding reunites her with her former best friend and her first love. What follows is an unraveling—an uncharacteristic public act, a cross-country pursuit, a risky tryst, and a reckoning that forces Helen to choose whether to return to the marriage that no longer fits, pursue a past that may no longer exist, or build a future rooted entirely in herself.

HELEN OF BOSTON shares the midlife examination of long-lived choices found in Benjamin Markovits’s THE REST OF OUR LIVES with the reflective, quietly searching tone of Katherine Heiny’s EARLY MORNING RISER.

HELEN OF BOSTON was developed over nine months in the highly regarded Novel Generator program at the GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing in Boston, where it underwent sustained drafting and revision in a workshop environment. I hold a BA and MA in English literature and writing and have spent more than two decades working in digital marketing, first in the software industry and later in higher education, crafting stories designed to engage and persuade. I now lead marketing and communications for New England’s largest homeless day shelter in Boston, work that continually brings me into close contact with lives shaped by disruption, courage, and the question of what it means to start over.