Good Riddance

A love letter to Elinor Lipman :

Elinor, you are perhaps the funniest of all the authors I read.  All your books are relevant to my life .  I feel like we could be friends.  I can relate to the way you think and the nuances of everyday life you are able to turn into comic novels.

In your newest novel about Daphne Maritch, who at a young impressionable age marries a man who is using her to gain his inheritance there are so many comedic events.  First I love that you set the stage to start in a small New Hampshire town, where Daphne grows up the daughter of the High School English teacher, the former June Winter and her husband the school principal, Thomas Maritch.  When she finds out that her husband is cheating on her and never really loved her, she initiates a divorce and moves into a small apartment in Manhattan.  Her father, now a widower, decides to also move to the big city, a lifelong dream. 

Enter the supporting characters, across the hall neighbor, Jeremy and down the hall neighbor, Geneva.  Geneva, finding a yearbook that Daphne had put in the recycling bin of the apartment building starts to investigate Daphne's past and her mother's special relationship to the high school graduating class of '68.  Lipman uses the yearbook to set in motion the complex interactions between all these characters.  Conversations between a grown daughter and her newly dating father. 
A widowed man and his new dating lifestyle.  A newly divorced young woman figuring out" friends with benefits" or real love in the fast paced city life.  While all of them are chasing the yearbook and the rights to use it for a documentary, a podcast or a play.

Again Elinor you have written a clever funny plot, while also bringing into sharp focus so many of the current issues that people are thinking about, discussing with friends and trying to balance.
You can laugh at the characters in the book while you take a look at yourself and how you relate to their problems.