These essays — moving, engaging, and deeply personal — explore the themes of family responsibility, growing up, and growing older. As the author, a divorced single mother beginning a new life and career in her forties, delves into the details of her own situation, she illuminates universal truths about what matters most: love, fulfillment, and the pain and necessity of huge change.These pieces about a woman in midlife struggling to come into her own in a complicated world are rich in insight and written with warmth, humour, and clear-eyed, sometimes devastating, honesty." Over a ten-year period, more than fifty of my essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and on CBC radio, read by me. These intensely personal stories were published or broadcast on air almost as soon as I' d written them. For this former actor and lifelong diarist just beginning to emerge as a writer, they were a wonderful combination of writing and performance; the feedback I received sounded like applause.But those years, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, were difficult. I was the single mother of two teenagers, struggling to make a living and find a new path through the world."Beth Kaplan