You’re Leaving When?

From the New York Times bestselling author of I See You Made an Effort comes a timely and hilarious chronicle of downward mobility, financial and emotional.

With signature sharp wit (NPR), Annabelle Gurwitch gives irreverent and empathetic voice to a generation hurtling into their next chapter with no safety net and proving that our no-frills new normal doesn’t mean a deficit of humor. In these essays, Gurwitch embraces homesharing, welcoming a housing-insecure young couple and a bunny rabbit into her home. The mother of a college student in recovery who sheds the gender binary, she relearns to parent, one pronoun at a time. She wades into the dating pool with a reupholstered vagina and flunks the magic of tidying up. You’re Leaving When? is for anybody who thought they had a semblance of security but wound up with a fragile economy and a blankie. What do we do when we’ve already reinvented in midlife? Gurwitch offers stories of resilience, adaptability, low-rent redemption, and the kindness of strangers. Even in a Zoom.

About Annabelle Gurwitch

ANNABELLE GURWITCH is the author of I See You Made an Effort (a New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist); Wherever You Go, There They Are; You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up (coauthored with Jeff Kahn); and Fired! (also a Showtime Comedy Special). She's written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Magazine, and was a regular contributor to NPR. The longtime cohost of Dinner & a Movie, she performs with the Moth Mainstage and at arts centers around the country. She lives with her child--a college graduate of the COVID class of 2020--a cat, and an assortment of tenants and their comfort animals in Los Angeles.

Praise

"Annabelle Gurwich is so funny that, even when bad things happen, she writes about them in a brilliantly entertaining way." --Dave Barry

Everyone needs a friend to guide them through the American middle class in decline, and you couldn't do better than Annabelle Gurwitch. She is sharp-eyed, un-foolable, and hilarious. --Barbara Ehrenreich

Erma Bombeck meets Dorothy Parker in this topical and often laugh-out-loud funny take on our modern malaise . . . Gurwitch possesses an appealingly cockeyed sense of humor, and she offers incisive takes on consumer culture and our contemporary confusions and lighthearted (though pointed) opinions on the travails that beset many middle-age women. In a consistently engaging narrative rich with personal anecdotes, the author pokes fun at her misadventures in love, work, and home maintenance, but she also addresses other pressing matters--economic vulnerability in the gig economy, social inequities, raising nonbinary children, friendship, homelessness, wellness fads, the challenges of a life in the arts, and the mysteries of Zoom--with a similarly breezy touch that is surprisingly effective . . . Gurwitch is a likable exemplar of the I'd-rather-laugh-about-it-than-cry-about-it philosophy. --Kirkus Reviews

Annabelle Gurwitch's You're Leaving When? is a pure delight, full of ambivalence, regret, laughter, rage, melancholy, and most importantly, honest observations about grappling with life's bewildering cavalcade of surprises and disappointments." --Heather Havrilesky, New York magazine's Ask Polly columnist and author of What If This Were Enough?

Gen X was promised the American Dream but instead found downward mobility, job insecurity, and non-stop caregiving. In her timely essays about boomerang kids, pandemic coworking, and post-divorce dating, Annabelle Gurwitch mines our generational ill luck for humor and insight as only a resilient latchkey kid can: with an arched brow and a gimlet eye. --Ada Calhoun, author of the New York Times bestseller Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

"Annabelle Gurwitch's You're Leaving When? is beyond hilarious! This "Grey-Divorced" yoga pants-wearing landlady should just invite us all into her home so we can curl up like cats around her (surely soon to be installed) wine bar for rap sessions about vaginal rejuvenation and radical swiffering. I loved it. A cheering midlife romp!" --Sandra Tsing Loh, author of The Madwoman in the Volvo

"Annabelle Gurwitch tells stories from her life that coalesce into a kind of literary comic opera. These may feel like the worst of times, but her wit, wisdom, and inimitable weirdness (that's a compliment) will get us through the madness. I'll happily follow her wherever she takes me." --Meghan Daum, author of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars