Ava Robinson

A touching and deeply funny debut about starting over sober only to discover life’s biggest messes are still waiting right where you left them.

The very last person anyone should worry about is Emma. Yes, hi, she’s an alcoholic. But she’s officially been sober for one entire year. That’s twelve months of better health. Fifty-two whole weeks of focusing on nothing but her nine-to-five office job, group meetings, and avoiding the kind of bad decisions that previously left her awash in shame and regret. It’s also been 365 days of not dating. And with her new dating profile, Emma, 26, of New York is ready to put herself back out there.

Except—was dating always this complicated? And did Emma’s mother really have to choose now to move in with her new boyfriend? Being assigned to plan her office’s holiday party feels like icing on the suddenly very overwhelming cake until her estranged father reappears with devastating news. Icing, meet cherry on top. But then there’s Ben, the charming IT guy who, despite Emma’s awkwardness and shortcomings, seems to maybe actually get her? Sobriety is turning out to be far from the flawless future Emma had once envisioned for herself, but as she allows herself to open up to Ben and confront difficult past relationships, she’s beginning to realize that taking things one day at a time might just be the perfectly imperfect path she’s meant to be on.

Bittersweet and darkly hilarious, Ava Robinson’s debut novel about navigating sobriety and complicated family dynamics is witty, heartbreaking, and profoundly relatable.

Definitely Better Now

Anna Oeltjenbruns

"True. But I inherited my team from my father, and he loved a winner. We were a Yankees family." I could see, through his jaundiced skin, that he was happy to have surprised me. "By those rules, does that make me a Yankees fan, too?" He nodded. "You can't choose your family, and you can't choose your baseball team. Not really.”

Fifty thousand dollars for one party? … This was hilarious, because I was paid exactly $49,440 a year. This was after a 3 percent raise at my six-month review--hence that uncomfortable four hundred and forty dollars hanging out around the end. I mean, hey, I'd take it. Four hundred and forty dollars was about a third of my rent; it was nothing to sneeze at. But I'd just learned that a whole year of me coming in at nine and leaving at five Monday through Friday, me being squished into subway cars, me emailing my colleagues fanatically to get last-minute deadlines out, me getting dressed even though I wanted more than anything to stay in bed, me forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, was worth five hundred and sixty dollars less than one night of an open bar. Good to know, I guess. 

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