A Woman of Questionable Judgment

At forty-three, Caroline Mercer is the emergency contact for eleven people. She has no idea who hers is.Caroline is the woman everyone calls.Her parents call when something needs handling. Her sister calls when family logistics go sideways. Her niece knows Caroline will rescue her. At work, problems have a remarkable tendency to become Caroline's problems because everyone knows one thing for certain: She'll figure it out.Caroline has always considered this a virtue.Then one ordinary Wednesday, after leaving an important meeting to retrieve her former sister-in-law's sixteen-year-old son from the orthodontist, Caroline turns off her phone.Nothing explodes.Nobody dies.And an uncomfortable question begins to follow her around: If Caroline stopped being useful to everyone else, what would be left for her?What follows isn't a dramatic reinvention. Caroline isn't abandoning her family, quitting her career, or running away to become someone unrecognizable.She likes her life.She'd simply like to live some of it herself.With the help of a friend who refuses to let her turn personal growth into another project and a seventy-something woman named Birdie who has little patience for unnecessary explanations, Caroline begins experimenting with the radical possibilities of unanswered phone calls, other people solving their own problems, Friday nights with nowhere she is supposed to be-and wanting things for no reason more defensible than wanting them.But when a real emergency comes, Caroline will have to discover whether she can remain the woman people can count on without disappearing inside everyone else's needs.Warm, funny, and deeply recognizable, A Woman of Questionable Judgment is a novel about the difference between being dependable and being permanently available-and what happens when a woman who has spent her life being needed finally asks what she wants.