Readers' Favorite

February 20, 2015

Excerpt: Love by the Book by Melissa Pimentel

Love by the Book
Anyway, I asked her to write something that would entice the menfolk and she came up with the following:

Lauren is an American expat who's been in London for a while now. She reads, drinks, and smokes a lot. She excels at the following activities: having fun, making sure her companions are having fun, eating baguettes, being clever. 

As a child, she rode a very fat horse named Jason, played defense in football, kick-boxed on a regular basis and got in trouble at her Catholic high school for reading Candide in church. When you meet her, none of this will surprise you.

Now. First of all, let me say that all of the above is true. But more important to the cause at hand, it makes me sound like Ignatius J. Reilly out of A Confederacy of Dunces. And yes, I know that reference just reinforced her description of me, but I'm trying to hide my true, hideous self from prospective suitors (at least for a little while).

So Meghan's description just wasn't going to cut the mustard. In the end, I confessed to Cathryn that I'd signed up to Castaways and begged her to write my description, hoping that her relatively scant knowledge of my adolescence would work in my favor. I was right, and Cathryn wrote a great, slightly fabricated couple of paragraphs that made me sound eminently more attractive than Meghan had.

It went online today along with a full-color photograph of my entire smiling face and from then on it was in the hands of the Internet dating gods.

page 56, Love by the Book by Melissa Pimentel


Buy Love by the Book at Amazon



5 comments:

  1. I am always up for reading about expats, whether they are Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1930s, or others more recent. One reason: my eldest son has spent almost twenty years as an expat in various countries.

    I am living vicariously through his adventures...LOL..

    Here's mine: “THE DAY WE MET”

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  2. This sounds like a fun read! I like the tone of Lauren's narration in the 56. I'll definitely have to look for this one!

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  3. Clever opening. This sounds like a delightful story.
    My Friday post features CHRISTMAS CRACKER.

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  4. I got a good laugh, sounds like a great lighthearted read!
    Happy weekend!

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  5. I have to read this. She sounds like me when I was younger. I too played tackle football. It was a girls team but I still played hard and had fun. Don't laugh, I was tight end. LOL yeah, I got ribbed a lot about that.
    My 56 - http://fuonlyknew.com/2015/02/20/the-friday-56-53-the-unseen/

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