52 Pick Up: Life in Perfect Disorder

With a startling emotional honesty that pulls no punches, Dani Forrest tells the story of a life shaped largely in avoidance.

For many people life happens when they're determinedly making other plans. For Marty May, the plans seem to happen despite her efforts to evade them. After fifty-two years, she finds herself standing in the shower wondering how exactly it was that it all went down, and whose plans she was actually living.

Each year of Marty's resolutely unplanned existence is presented via a vignette highlighting some aspect of the outside circumstances that just seem to sweep her along. The ongoing dramas of parents, stepparents, siblings, and half-siblings - and then those of husbands and step kids. Education that provides knowledge but not necessarily wisdom. Rollicking serial monogamy that isn't always monogamous or especially rollicking. Jobs that try to turn into careers but never quite make it. All of them stories that seem to be hers but that she doesn't quite manage to fully occupy. Years become decades, culminating with a heartbreak that forces Marty to make peace with the reality that life indeed just...happens.

Meditative and honest, 52 Pick Up: Life in Perfect Disorder is one woman's hard look at a life that seems to have chosen her. It's a story that plainly states the costs of not choosing, yet one that also allows for the possibility that there can be a beautiful rightness to being carried along by circumstance. And that perhaps, in the end, it doesn't really matter.