Title: Sweet remedy
First published: 1996
Description: Six months after breaking up with Tom, her husband of eighteen years, Polly Harrison is still trying to put her life in order. Her two smart-alecky kids are driving her to distraction, and she has to work as an office temp just to make ends meet. In her spare moments, she scribbles away at country music lyrics and dreams of a career in Nashville. And all the while, she still obsesses over what Tom is doing, even to the point of carrying on elaborate fantasy conversations with the "other woman.".

But just when Polly thinks she's finally ready for social life as a newly single woman, her eighty-two-year-old grandmother drops in for a visit - and then decides to stay, disrupting the whole household. Something even more surprising is waiting right outside Polly's front door, although it's not quite what she thought she was hoping for....

Banished from the home they fashioned together, Tom is actually more present than he ever was before. Guilt and renewed faith have brought him back to the house he spent so much time away from. But Polly, driven by her own longing and confusion, turns away from home - to her first brave but hesitant steps toward a freedom that might only be an illusion, then to the arms of a familiar stranger, finally and inevitably to the rich heritage she has almost forgotten, the country music of her early years.

With her grandmother as a constant reminder of her Oklahoma childhood, Polly's lyrics begin flowing from her troubled heart - sometimes revealing more about living and loving than she knows, but always taking her back to a past she barely remembers and forward to a present she is only now beginning to understand.

Filled with the small truths that hit close to home, Sweet Remedy is a rueful and funny account of the painful lessons of domestic life and love, where the bitter mixes with the sweet in surprising proportions. As her ornery grandmother stubbornly forces a mysterious inheritance on her, Polly slowly comes to realize that the heart often knows what the mind doesn't.

And when a stalker who has pursued her for weeks brings fear and then shocking violence into her home, Polly finds the strength not just to survive but to heal - herself and her family. A good dose of her grandmother's secret remedy evokes in Polly and Tom memories of a past too rich to discard and a future too full of unexpected passion and promise to jeopardize.
Subjects: Middle-aged women, Fiction, Man-woman relationships
LC classification: PS3551.S416 S9 1996