Laura Harrington & ALICE BLISS
The Melrose Public Library is proud to continue the popular “Author’s Corner “ program with award winning playwright Laura Harrington author of the best- selling novel “Alice Bliss”.
Laura Harrington is an award-winning playwright, lyricist and librettist. She teaches playwriting at MIT and lives in Gloucester, MA. “Alice Bliss”, her first novel, grew out of Harrington’s one-woman musical Alice Unwrapped, which ran off-Broadway in New York and in the Minneapolis Fringe Festival in 2009. “Alice Bliss”is a coming of age story that is both timeless and incredibly timely. Currently there are more than 300,000 teens in the US with family members who are deployed—“Alice Bliss”movingly illuminates the impact of war on those left at home: children, partners, family members, and the community.
When Alice learns her father is being deployed to Iraq, she’s heartbroken. Matt Bliss is leaving just as his daughter blossoms into a full-blown teenager. She will learn to drive, shop for a dress for her first dance, and fall in love all while trying to be strong for her mother and take care of her younger sister. She is a tremendous girl, one who sneaks her way into your heart with her strength, her vulnerability, and her struggles with the trappings of being an awkward teen, confronting life without her beloved father. His scent is fading from the shirt of his she wears every day, and his phone calls are never enough.
A profoundly moving, uplifting novel “Alice Bliss”is a story about those who are left at home during wartime and a teenage girl bravely facing the future. Books will be available for purchase that night, courtesy of Haley Booksellers.
