From the author of the best-selling Sweetbitter comes an intimate, searingly honest memoir of growing up the child of addicts, of how that turbulent, often harrowing experience has affected her at every stage of her life, and of how she has struggled to transcend this unwanted legacy.When Sweetbitter was published to great success, the author knew she should be happy, but she felt incapable of it, emotionally shut down. She knew too that the roots of her inability to feel were deep in her childhood. With some hope of finally facing down her past—of looking clearly at her parents and what she did and did not inherit from them—she returned to California after a decade away, a decade in which she'd honed the practice of apathy. Stray is an account of that remarkable emotional journey. We meet her mother: a depressed alcoholic, now mentally and physically handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm and living in squalor; and her father: once...

A lush, raw, thrilling novel of the senses about a year in the life of a uniquely beguiling young woman, set in the wild, alluring world of a famous downtown New York restaurant."Let's say I was born when I came over the George Washington Bridge..." This is how we meet unforgettable Tess, the twenty-two-year-old at the heart of this stunning first novel. Shot from a mundane, provincial past, she's come to New York to look for a life she can't define, except as a burning drive to become someone, to belong somewhere. After she stumbles into a coveted job at a renowned Union Square restaurant, we spend the year with her as she learns the chaotic, punishing, privileged life of a "backwaiter," on duty and off. Her appetites--for food, wine, knowledge, and every kind of experience--are awakened. And she's pulled into the magnetic thrall of two other servers--a handsome bartender she falls hard for, and an older woman she latches onto with an orphan's ardor....