I wanted to continue the more lighthearted mood engendered by The Road to Roswell but wasn’t wanting more science fiction, so I decided instead to look for an entry in the “relationship fiction” category. I couldn’t find an available check-out at the library, so I searched my Kindle for a reread and remembered Kelly Harms’s The Overdue Life of Amy Byler, which I read back in 2019 and enjoyed quite a lot.

Rather than re-hashing, I will post a link to my previous review here, but will add that one of the reasons I appreciated this book (in addition to the book- and librarian-related story line and the makeover of “momjeans”) was because it dropped me into a world that, at a naive and hopeful 18, I thought might be a career choice.

At a certain age, we all look back at the possibilities we passed up, the roads we didn’t travel, and wonder what would have resulted had we made different choices; one of my fantasy life stories was to go to New York City to become a book editor or work for a high-end magazine publisher. (Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar had a big effect on me in high school.) Amy Byler’s friend Talia, the chic, single, city-loving editor of a fashion magazine, was the definition of my dream, and the summer Amy spends in the city housesitting her empty apartment while attending theater productions, going to museums, and discovering wonderful restaurants, sounded like a lifestyle I would have loved.

One of the few regrets I have is that I have never made it to NYC, even for a visit. I guess there’s still time left…but my dream was to conquer the boulevards by striding down them in my Reeboks on the way to the office with all the other up-and-comers, not to be a tourist taking the freight elevator to the top of the Empire State Building in my wheelchair. I guess Amy wasn’t the only one with an overdue life! I mostly don’t regret the one I have lived, but I certainly wish I had been more adventurous at key moments and thus had more on which I could look back with satisfaction. Perhaps I will stick with the fantasy fulfillment of books like this one and simply pretend to be the person living the story—isn’t that really what reading is all about?