Tuesday, July 10, 2012

"The Singles"

Meredith Goldstein is an advice columnist and entertainment reporter for The Boston Globe. Her column Love Letters is a daily dispatch of wisdom for the lovelorn that gets about 1 million page views every month on Boston.com. Love Letters appears in the Globe’s print edition every Saturday. Goldstein also writes about fake rock stars, former boy banders, female werewolves, self-help books, last picture shows, and how to sound like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Singles, her debut novel, and reported the following:
The Singles takes place at a wedding, but the story isn’t about the bride and groom.

The novel puts the spotlight on the only five guests at the wedding who don’t have a date. Three of those “singles” happen to be men. And that’s why Page 69 is a great example of what you’ll find in the book.

Page 69 is about my favorite male character, Phil. He’s a wedding guest who is forced to attend the nuptials of two perfect strangers because his mother (a friend of the groom’s mom) is too sick to attend.

By day (and night), Phil is a ballpark security guard for the Orioles who lives alone and loves to gamble on college sports. He spends much of the wedding thinking about an ex-girlfriend, checking the score of a college football game, and coming to terms with his complicated relationship with his mother.

Page 69 is all about Phil’s deep love for his mother and why he’s so worried about her all of the time. It’s one of the pages that made me fall in love with one of my own characters. And it’s pretty representative of my novel, which is absolutely a funny story about a crazy wedding, but is also a rather intimate look at how people cope with being alone.
Learn more about the book and author at Meredith Goldstein's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue