Straight Up

Verity Drummond?florist by trade and a fantasist by nature?deals with the end of her marriage by writing Straight Up, a novel in which a man on a mountaineering expedition (bearing a striking resemblance to her ex) dies all alone in a hole in the ice, starving, wretched, and with his broken bones poking through his skin.?Meanwhile in Hollywood,?Jasmine and Patrice want to adapt Straight Up for the screen. When Verity goes to meet them, somehow, between the dead man on the mountain and?her inability to admit that she's just another divorcee like the rest of California, she becomes The Widow. The buzz around the script, now "based on a true story," begins to grow and with it, the biggest rolling snowball and the tightest tangled web of Verity's life. The story whirlwinds from LA to NYC?and while the voice as is sharp as it is dark, there is a top-note of poignancy, and 100 laughs along the way.

Catriona McCloud is the author of Growing Up Again.