Mo Daviau — Epic and Lovely: A Novel - with Kelly Sather

Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, causes several physical deformities, and results in death around the age of forty.Written as a deathbed letter to the UCLA physician who has tracked Nina and the other Good Thumbs throughout their lives, Nina recounts her final days with the group and with Cole, the charismatic, sadistic fellow A12er with whom she has fallen madly in love, who charms and harms her in equal measures. An unlikely alliance with a tech billionaire, the return of her estranged mother, and the birth of the baby she never thought she'd have force Nina to reckon with the triumphs and mistakes of her life and to fight to leave her child in good hands.Mo Daviau is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Daviau lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a bookseller.Daviau is in conversation with Kelly Sather, the author of Small in Real Life, her debut story collection and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. A former entertainment lawyer and screenwriter, she received an MFA from Bennington, and her work has appeared in Santa Monica Review, The Southampton Review, Literary Hub, PANK, and elsewhere. She writes about books and art-making, fame and desire for her Substack, Small in Real Life. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Washington, D.C.  https://politics-prose.com/book/9781959000624?ic_referral=-fI4wtOgurJ6IEKLF6FXoLkwuRLSM7AXXTXA_SaFMKYwMx0AnLXnPEUej0S38WmgIRAXSFycUTlTxdCXm-0MRuUAmguoUtGHJPoHvg1Ez9xsKyiP2UYQniY4LsRN6N1uvlSfc8Q