Sylvia's Second Act

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When 63-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with their Boca retirement community floozy, she feels the emotions you'd expect (shock, fury), but once she collapses in a booth at a bar late that night with her best friend, the glamorous older widow Evie, Sylvia allows herself to admit some things to herself: she hates Boca. It's for old people, and she doesn't feel old. While she's beyond angry with her husband, she acknowledges that she hasn't exactly been the best partner of late either, and that their relationship may have run its course. Sylvia wants to travel and have adventures. She sacrificed her own career potential to raise a daughter and keep house-and she doesn't regret it, she just also wants more for herself.

Sylvia decides it isn't too late to go and get the life she wants. She enlists Eve to come along with, and the two flee Boca for Manhattan.

What she doesn't anticipate is how unsupportive her daughter and husband are of her plan. Isabel is convinced her mother's "life of leisure" up to this point makes her "entirely ill-suited" for the work force, and she must "just make it work with Dad." Worse, her husband reveals he's lost their life savings, and he cuts off her credit card to boot.

But Sylvia and Evie are scrappy and determined, unopposed to pawning jewelry, roughing it at a NYC youth hostel and freshening up in a Starbucks bathroom along the way. Manhattan, careers, romance, sex, fun-their entire second acts are stretched out in front of them, beckoning them. It's their time.

Author Bio

Originally from the Chicago area, Hillary Yablon lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young sons. She is a graduate of Princeton University, and earned her M.A. in poetry from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. This, her debut novel, received the Allegra Johnson Fiction Award at UCLA.