This Is Our Story

Description:
Ideals and reality collide when six college friends band together to start an ice cream store, promising ""Better Food for a Better World,"" but finding a worse world than they had expected.

It seems like a great idea: six friends from college pool their money and energy to start an ice cream store. Natural High Ice Cream: Better Food for a Better World. It's high-minded, with a wink, like the marital self-help group they all belong to. The store finds a ready clientele in its northern California college town filled with amiable ex-hippies who are happy to contribute to a better world, even if all they have to contribute is the price of an ice cream cone.

But the store, like the marriage group, turns out to be work, not fun, and rifts start to appear between the friends. Nancy, who had seemed so easygoing and sweetly sexy when they started, turns stern. Cecilia, who had wanted to be a musician, is openly bored. And flighty, excitable Vivy is crawling out of her skin. She yearns for the old days, before Natural High, when she and her husband Sam traveled around the country with countercultural musicians and dancers. She'd give anything to have those days back again.

And so quietly, without telling the partners, she starts to rev up the old company, contacting her old acts--the fat contortionist, the muscle-bound juggler. She's going to save them all, and Natural High, too. But saving turns out to be harder than it looks, and Vivy isn't the only one with secrets.


Endorsements:
""Erin McGraw's latest book is a treasure. With her trademark élan and seamless storytelling, she manages to get to the very heart of the blessing and disaster that friendship, good intentions, and love can all be. Better Food for a Better World is a beautiful, funny, and haunting tale of who and where we are right now.""
--Bret Lott, author of Jewel and Dead Low Tide

""With soaring grace and sizzling humor, Erin McGraw fuses the piercing irony of Jane Austen with the subversive, satiric charm of Miguel de Cervantes. Here is a writer who loves her people enough to expose their outrageous flaws and celebrate their wild failings. Here is a visionary who offers delight as the first gift and hilarity as a path to transcendence.""
--Melanie Rae Thon, author of First, Body and The Voice of the River

""With each new book, Erin McGraw does something with her narratives I previously thought impossible. In Better Food for a Better World, she writes with great generosity about the struggle to be a good person; but, more importantly, she reveals how chaotic and hilarious the process can actually be. This is an expansive, beautiful novel that will rattle around in your heart and make it a better place.""
--Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

""What great pleasure to find a book as full of life as this one is--its characters so marvelously charged with energy, its plot so deliciously idiosyncratic that a reader might be forgiven for failing to properly appreciate the novel's athletic, deceptively simple prose. This is the true rarity in contemporary literature: a book overflowing with profound, authentic joy.""
--Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories


About the Contributor(s):
Erin McGraw is the author of five earlier books, the novels The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard and The Baby Tree, and the story collections The Good Life, Lies of the Saints, and Bodies at Sea. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Good Housekeeping, The Kenyon Review, Allure, Image, The Southern Review, STORY, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and magazines. She has taught at DePauw University and the Universit