Local Author Rachel Lithgow

Lithgow offers a memoir of coming to terms with the past while enjoying the present.

Months before the author’s 50th birthday, Joe, “the first man [she] ever dated to make [her] feel completely safe at any moment,” abruptly broke up with her to move to Phoenix and live with a woman he met a week before. In her debut memoir, Lithgow chronicles the aftermath of the breakup, in which she dated a series of men who were diversely and spectacularly peculiar. Trying to finalize the divorce ending her fraught 22-year marriage, raise two teenagers, and remake her career wa taking its toll. Emotional exhaustion was compounded by the sudden surfacing of “the darkest, saddest, angriest parts of [her]self that [she] could never deal with or had the time to explore.” Her friend Leah connected her with Dr. Z (a practitioner of Rapid Transformational Therapy, “a combination of hypnosis, talk therapy, and coaching”), who diagnosed her with PTSD caused by a chaotic family life. Her RTT work with Dr. Z provided welcome relief. Lithgow’s writing shines a humorous light on the vagaries of online dating, as evidenced by her concept of “dating math”: “Even after I applied the dating math algorithm in my head, which aged him five years and decreased his height by four inches, he was still someone I’d date.” Descriptions of the verbal abuse heaped on her by her in-laws and her own family are hair-raising, making her ability to come to terms with her past all the sweeter.

Funny, honest, and heart-wrenching; true to the title, the dates are really bad.

Lithgow will appear in-conversation with Dr. Lisa Zaretsky. Please register.