Available: A Very Honest Account of Life After Divorce

In this heartwarming and humorous debut, Williams lays bare her painful divorce at age 47 and subsequent dating adventures—from the good to the mind-blowingly bad. After 27 years and three children together, Williams, a “stay-home PTA mom,” and her husband’s marriage was upended in 2018 when she discovered he was having an affair with a woman 20 years her junior. When her husband admitted he cheated “to get out of our marriage,” she divorced him and entered the daunting dating pool of New York City, her trip through the waters of singledom and sex playfully dubbed by a suitor as Laura’s Liberation Tour. Archly referring to her partners by number, she recounts trying out Tinder, finding her “mojo” via a series of sexual hijinks (“one-night stand with #1, my debacle with #2, my summer flings with #3 and #4, the disaster that #5 has turned out to be”), and encountering revelations of empowerment along the way: “it’s possible to have it all, if only you’re flexible about what that actually means.” Rendered in her wry prose, Williams’s candid confessions about middle-aged dating and tender takes on redefining motherhood postdivorce—“I can be a mother and a fulfilled woman... the two are not mutually exclusive”—are worth lingering over. Sex in the city gets refreshingly real in this charming work. (May)