Unwanted Attention: A Novel

Two wildly different sisters experiencing spectacular midlife implosions. One mother who cannot believe they’re both living under her roof again.

Henley is forty-something, thrice-divorced, unemployed, and desperate to become a mother. Back in her childhood home in suburban Detroit, she stumbles into unlikely success online when her provocative noodle-eating videos go viral, bringing her the money she needs to adopt a baby and exactly the kind of attention that could make it impossible.

Ferris, Henley’s younger sister, has done everything right: She’s an oncologist with a successful husband and the life their mother always wanted for her. But after years of grueling, unsuccessful fertility treatments, one decision sends her marriage into freefall—and Ferris home to Mama, too.

Despite having grown apart since their childhood, when a long-buried family secret surfaces, the sisters must work together to reckon with the complicated truth of their shared history and what it means for their family’s future.

Irrepressibly funny, tender, and alive, Unwanted Attention is a wholly original novel about failure and reinvention, mothers and daughters, cultural inheritance, and the people who drive us crazy because they know us best.