cover image The Year of Yes: A Memoir

The Year of Yes: A Memoir

Maria Dahvana Headley, . . Hyperion, $22.95 (275pp) ISBN 978-1-4013-0230-6

When Idaho-born Headley, a 20-year-old NYU drama student, laments, "I felt like I'd dated and then hated every man in Manhattan," she thinks perhaps she's too critical. So she "decided that I would say yes to every man who asked me out on a date." It sounds disastrous, even scary, though she chose to exclude the drunk, the drugged, the violent, and cheating husbands. The first date was the Puerto Rican handyman who came to fix the toilet with his daughter in tow, the second a 40-year-old who spoke only Polish. One took her to a strip joint, one wanted his penis bitten, one was a woman and one asked her to marry him on the first date. One of the nicest turned out to be the 70-year-old Latino who made obscene sucking noises and claimed to have 11 children. The one Headley got a crush on turned out to be "mostly gay." And then what happened? Believe it or not—true love. Reader, she married him. It's sheer chick fluff, but amusing, with names changed "to protect the indignant, the infantile, and, of course, the innocent." Agents, Suzanne Gluck and Andy McNicol. (Jan. 11)