Happy Family

Tracy Barone earned her MFA in dramatic writing at NYU and has worked as a screenwriter and playwright. She has worked in Hollywood, where she was the Executive Producer on Wild, Wild, West, Rosewood, My Fellow Americans, and Money Train and was instrumental in the acquisition and development of Men in Black and Ali. In addition to an MFA, Barone holds a B.A. from NYU.

One of these things is not like the other. That's how Cheri Matzner felt growing up in her adoptive family, and it's what continues to define her as she tries to start a family of her own. Funny and fierce, desperate for connection yet pushing it away with both hands, she needs to jump-start a marriage in danger of flatlining and save her career from scandal.But Cheri is still contending with a complicated relationship with her parents -- her aging Italian bombshell of a mother and a distant father who looms large, even in death -- unaware of the sacrifices they made to be together or of the difficult truths and lies in their marriage.When tragedy unravels Cheri's well-designed defenses, she is thrust into an odyssey of acceptance that brings her full circle back to her dramatic origins. Sometimes it takes half a lifetime to come of age. To be able to glimpse our parents beyond their roles as our parents. To uncover the many versions of truth within our family stories and within our own. And to laugh at it all just a little bit sooner.

In Tracy Barone's mordantly funny debut, a fiercely independent woman is forced to come to terms with the family who raised her, the one who gave her away and the one she desperately wants.