“This Was Not the Plan” Book Launch Reading with Daphne Uviller (in person at HVWC)

Please join us for a reading from Daphne Uviller’s new book “This Was Not the Plan.” The author will read from her latest book as well as engage in a lively conversation with author Heather Hewett. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and the author is happy to sign them.

When theater director Sylvia Tanisman wins her first Tony award, her husband uses the occasion to announce he’s divorcing her. Sylvia flees the shambles of her marriage by accepting a visiting professorship at Linden, an elite college in Pierre, New York. A few counties north, high school senior Meg Croyden has narrowly survived a self-destructive, rebellious youth and is headed to Linden on a full scholarship. In the town of Pierre, lifelong resident and devout Catholic Caroline Byrne McClanahan struggles with the secret shame of a family that is falling apart. When circumstances bring the three women—hailing from starkly different worlds—to the local abortion clinic in Pierre, their fates are forever entwined.

This Was Not the Plan tackles one of the most important issues of our time with humor, compassion, and authenticity. The story is by turns funny, dark, and darkly funny. The collision of the lives of Sylvia, Meg, and Caroline reminds us of the dangers of thinking in black and white and the importance and possibility of finding humanity in each other, even where you least expect it.

“This Was Not the Plan starts out as a funny and sharply observed campus novel and then deepens into a thought-provoking examination of the complicated and always thorny politics of abortion. Daphne Uviller is a shrewd and compassionate writer, able to imagine a wide variety of intersecting lives and outlooks, and find humor in even the darkest moments.”
— Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of ELECTION and TRACY FLICK CAN’T WIN

Daphne Uviller is also the author of the Zephyr Zuckerman Series: Super in the City, Hotel No Tell and Wife of the Day. The television rights to the series were optioned jointly to Paramount Television and Silver Lake Entertainment. A former Books/Poetry editor at Time Out New York, Daphne’s reviews, profiles, and articles have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsday, The Forward, New York Magazine, Oxygen, Allure, and Self, for which she used to write an ethics column. Daphne also co-edited, with Deborah Siegel, the acclaimed anthology Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. All her books are available in paperback and e-versions. A third-generation Greenwich Villager, Daphne lives near the Hudson River with her family and dog.