This novel takes place mostly in and around Rockville, Maryland, a suburb in the DC area. The protagonist of the novel, Jane Kramer, works with her husband in a furniture store on Rockville Pike, a main thoroughfare there. Jane is really down on life with worries about her and her husband's financial condition as well as their floundering marriage. She works in the store alongside her husband and his Uncle Seymour. She also has a teenage son, Josh, who has lately turned to Goth with all of its trappings including several face piercings and who has been suspended by the private school he attends. On top of that, she is concerned that her husband may be having an affair with Delia, a furniture saleswoman. She has no real friends and to find solace, she walks across the street at lunchtime to sit at the graves of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald who are buried there in a church graveyard. To try to earn more money, she becomes a "memory consultant" for Memories, Inc. which is run out of people's homes. In other words, she gets involved in scrapbooking which may be a pyramid scheme. When Justin flees to New York with a Goth friend without informing her and Leon leaves on a business trip with Delia, Jane follows and ends up having some escapades of her own.

I read this novel solely because it takes place in Rockville where I lived with my family for 13 years while I was working for the government in DC. The Fitzgeralds are indeed buried in the family plot at St. Mary's Church there. We attended mass at St. Mary's and often visited the gravesite which enhanced my interest in the Fitzgeralds.

Not sure what I was expecting when I started reading this and at first the novel tended to drag a bit for me. But as it continued, I really enjoyed the characters and the humor included in the story. By the end, I was glad I decided to read this one!

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