Bar Maid

A sparkingly witty, poignant debut novel that is a Bright Lights Big City for a post-Reagan, pre-Y2K Philadelphia—for readers of Normal People, Sweetbitter, Modern Lovers, and Less.

It's September 1987. Charlie Green is an eighteen-year-old romantic and aspiring alcoholic, whose great wish is to fall in love with a light-eyed girl on his first day of college and never look back. Charlie believes in the magic of bars, girls, and Fate. He believes he can use these talismans to finally feel at home, an assurance his dim and privileged childhood did not provide. In the Samson Street Oyster House, he meets Paula Henderson, a beautiful and deceptively soulful waitress who is the most overqualified bar maid in all the city—and the most alluring.  

But there are many obstacles in the Philly night between our protagonist and his full heart. Drunks, louts, boyfriends—heroes too. And in Paula's eyes, Charlie becomes one. When she takes Charlie home to New Hope, PA, to meet her mother, Charlie not only loses his virginity in horrifying awkward fashion but accidentally impregnates Paula. Coaxed into marriage by the very Catholic Mrs. Henderson, the two honeymoon in Paris, the set piece for so many of Charlie's dreams. Amid the five-star luxuries of their George V hotel suite, Paula miscarries. Now the young couple most overcome this tragedy, their critical youth and its potent temptations, and the bad advice of adults in order to stick it out, stay a couple, and find their collective soul. Together.