Jack Griffin never wanted to be like his parents. For thirty years, he has been married, has a well-adjusted daughter, and after his career as a Hollywood screenwriter, he became a professor at a small college in the Northeast. But now, in his mid-fifties, he realizes that the life patterns of his wonderfully awful parents have long caught up with him. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo, who has long been regarded as one of the significant writers in the U.S., demonstrates in his multifaceted novel that we can never fully escape the roles we seek to flee from: we either repeat them or turn them into their opposite. This old yearning entertainingly and artfully illustrates that family is where the worst, but also the best, happens to us. A romantic comedy from midlife, full of humor and optimism.