UNTIL HE DOESN’T: A Novel of Love, Loss, and Unexpected Triumph
Hilarious and heartfelt—an exuberant saga about losing your life and building a better one. Tess McFarland, expert on sexual bonding, discovers her husband’s sizzling affair and morphs into Cave Woman With Club. No one is taking her mate! No one’s ripping apart the marriage and career she spent twenty years building. Tess’s straight-arrow sister, baffled mother-in-law, and a wealthy admirer jump onboard as Tess chases solutions from Stanford to snowy ski slopes to Mexican markets in Santa Cruz. They are trying to help, aren’t they? Because nothing’s working out. Tess’s red-haired rival is young and smart, using the astonishing power of sex to disrupt lives.
Tess’s own research confirms her problem—love and sex are completely separate brain functions, over-riding each other like super powers with a veto. Steamy hookups with a new partner can easily trump marriage vows. Tess struggles to outmaneuver the data—we evolved to love deeply; we evolved to stray. Shouldn’t love and sex be working together for our happiness? With an extraordinary insight, Tess resolves the dilemma. On stage in Rome, keynote speaker Tess gives herself a happy ending and the world’s oldest story a surprising twist. Love and sex, jealousy, desire—the most fascinating, obsessive, often violent drives humans have, and with Tess in charge, they’re also the funniest.
Praise For UNTIL HE DOESN’T
“I rarely laugh out loud when reading. I was still laughing three days later.” Merrilyn Duzy, Walking Through History, Artists Who Changed America, Quarks and Quasars. www.merrilynduzy.com
“I absolutely love this book. The humor is a wonderful remedy for the pain of abandonment.” Susan Samuels Drake, Author, Poet. Fields of Courage: Remembering Cèsar Chávez; Wandering Amazed, A Book of Poetry.
Witty and life-affirming—a rare combination of funny, complex, vulnerable characters who will break your heart.” June Langhoff, Best-selling author. Business Traveler’s Survival Guide; The Telecommuter’s Advisor. www.junelanghoff.com
“A fascinating story told with breath-taking skills. It challenges our assumptions about love and sex—definitely a must-read.” Aleshia Brevard, Author, Actress, The Woman I Was Born To Be; Bilbo’s Bend. www.aleshiabrevard.com
Recent research shows that infidelity is hardwired into our brains, making UNTIL HE DOESN’T a perfect choice for Book Club discussions. Nine hundred thousand US divorces are filed each year. Fifty percent of adults say they’ve been unfaithful at some point in their lives. Tess’s laugh-out-loud adventures and her husband’s reflective counterpoint help us understand why.