Anna’s been doing her best to exist in the wake of some crippling guilt over her father’s death in a house fire many years ago. But her best isn’t really cutting it. When we meet her, her below potential status goes from bad to worse: she loses her job. Just when Anna thinks her career is over, she gets the opportunity of a lifetime to pen a nightlife column—something she’s severely unqualified to report on. But she’s at a critical point where she has to learn to fight for what she wants—her life back, and this may be an abrupt beginning, but it’s a start. If she can only find her way behind the velvet rope, the world finally starts to open up to Anna again. Ready or not, she’ll have to find a way to grab life by the martini glass and start to drink her fill, before it’s too late.
“A wonderful coming of age story.”
—Harriet Klausner
“…The defining moment in Anna’s life is the death of her father in a fire when she is eight. Obviously a tragic situation, but for Anna it’s even worse: she believes she murdered him. Now in her late twenties, how she lives and her every action and inaction is based on her massive guilt. Two events change the course of her life. She is given a column of her own critiquing the newest hot spots, for which she is woefully underqualified, and one of her two best friends, Ray, with whom she’s lived platonically for years, convinces her to get therapy. Brodsky’s novel is funny and melancholy as Anna gets her life back on track and succeeds beyond anything she ever imagined.”
—Booklist
Backstory
I wrote my third novel, The Velvet Rope Diaries, at a point when I felt my craft had been expanded enough to tackle the issues of loss I’d long wanted to write about. I don’t believe we ever get over the fear and loss of losing someone we love—especially when we are young. Conversely, a secure family network is such a powerful element in our development. These conditions inform every aspect of our lives—our sense of security, our confidence, our outlook. In some way or another, I always revisit this idea of how experience shapes us. I believe I will always be riddled by this concept, but lucky for me, this is the subtext of every story ever told—we are never divorced from our history, no matter how we try to shake it. Just ask Madonna.
