Read Epic and Lovely by Mo Daviau

Hello Middle-Aged Punk Rock Women! For November, we'll dive into a local author's work. She works at Annie Bloom's Books! "This book is a love bomb, a love bloom, a love letter from a soul on the edge of death who talks back, cracks wise, and throws down wisdom. Daviau reminds us that death always kisses birth, living always births dying, crying keeps us whole, and laughter is good medicine. I swooned." ―Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves: A Memoir and The Chronology of Water Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, causes several physical deformities, and results in death around the age of forty. Written as a deathbed letter to the UCLA physician who has tracked Nina and the other Good Thumbs throughout their lives, Nina recounts her final days with the group and with Cole, the charismatic, sadistic fellow A12er with whom she has fallen madly in love, who charms and harms her in equal measures. An unlikely alliance with a tech billionaire, the return of her estranged mother, and the birth of the baby she never thought she’d have force Nina to reckon with the triumphs and mistakes of her life and to fight to leave her child in good hands.