My Year of Casual Acquaintances: Meet the Characters
My new episodic novel follows Margaret (“Mar”) Meyer through her first year of single life, moving each month from one acquaintance to the next to escape the pain of her divorce. As Indies Today said in their 5-star advance review, “When Ruth F. Stevens writes about gray divorce and second chances, you’ll believe anything is […]
Meet Margaret Meyer
Margaret (“Mar”) Meyer—engineering journal editor, fitness enthusiast, and youthful-looking 50-year-old—is cranky, quirky, and often disappointed in the people around her. Picture the temperament of Olive Kitteridge in the body of Sutton Foster! She’s the narrator of My Year of Casual Acquaintances, my upcoming women’s/contemporary/ humorous/book club fiction novel. When we meet Mar, whose husband has […]
Remembering Dotty
My mother’s death in 2014 ended her decades of close friendship with Dorothy (“Dotty”) Licht. But I was fortunate enough to enjoy a long-distance correspondence with this amazing lady in the years that followed. At the age of 101-1/2, Dotty still lived alone in her marital home in Providence, Rhode Island. Unlike my mother, who […]
A Dose of Hope—Make That Two Doses, Please.
On a cloudy January afternoon as I drove up Hawthorne Boulevard through the Palos Verdes Peninsula, I heard the good news on my car radio: Los Angeles County had just opened up its COVID vaccination program to residents in my age group. Then came the challenging part. I turned the car around and headed straight […]
Happy NYE 2030 (A New Year’s Fantasy)
I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before… Next year, things will get better. They can’t get any worse, right? That’s what we all used to believe. But we thought we knew so much a decade ago, back in 2020, during the early days of The Sickness. In the words of Bob Dylan, “I […]
Nine Things I’m Grateful for During COVID.
When I set out to write this article, my plan was to call it “Ten Things I’m Grateful for,” which has a much nicer ring to it…but I couldn’t come up with ten. Where this damned virus is concerned, it’s not easy to find those silver linings inside the cloud. Anyway, here goes… Frontline workers. […]
On My Mother’s 100th Birthday…Remembering Her as She Was.
When people hear that I had a parent who suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, they sometimes ask, “After they’re gone, how long does it take to remember them the way they were before?” Everyone has a different timetable—but for me, the answer is about five years. It took until now, the month when she would have […]
