We Hope You Like This Song

From fourth grade onward, shy, nervous Bree Housley and fearless, outgoing Shelly were an inseparable, albeit unlikely, pair. Their friendship survived everything from the awkward years of junior high to the transformative upheavals of early adulthood?until, at the young age of 25, Shelly lost her life to complications caused by Preeclampsia.

We Hope You Like This Song is a tribute to the ineffable, incomparable bond that we call friendship, and a celebration of living life to the fullest. Housley recounts how she and her sister found a way to keep Shelly’s memory alive?by spending a year doing crazy things that Shelly would have done, like giving Valentines to strangers, singing at a karaoke bar, and letting her boyfriend pick out her outfits for a week. In the process, she paints a vivid, often hilarious, portrait of her fun-loving, social butterfly best friend and the many adventures they had growing up together in '80s and ’90s small-town America. Sweet, poignant, and yet somehow laugh-out-loud funny, We Hope You Like This Song is a touching story of love, loss, and the honoring of a friendship after it’s gone.

As an award-winning advertising copywriter, Bree Housley has mastered ?the voice” of moms, kids, dads, and dudes in order to sell products ranging from Pepsi to mustache wax. She has also had the pleasure of writing ad campaigns featuring some of the most quick-witted ladies in showbiz, including Amy Sedaris and Rachael Harris.

Housley always knew she had a passion for entertaining others through the written word, so after graduating with a degree in advertising at Iowa State University in Ames, she traded in her snowsuit for 0 SPF suntan lotion and attended the widely respected advertising industry darling, Miami Ad School, in Florida. At MAS, she learned to write snappy TV, print, radio, and web ads for a broad audience. She also dabbled in stand-up comedy and realized that stories of her small-town childhood made people laugh. A lot.

Along with her sister, Courtnee, Housley wrote a successful blog, Fifty2Resolutions, to document their goal of accomplishing 52 resolutions in 52 weeks. The first week Fifty2Resolutions hit the web, it was ranked number 55 on Wordpress's top 100 growing blogs of the day.

Today, Housley lives in Chicago with her husband, Eric. After a decade of crafting product-focused copy, she is thrilled to write in her own voice about a subject that means the world to her.