Almost Like Praying

Dolores Farrell, of Sherborn, Massachusetts, had her future all planned out: she’d marry an attorney, have sons who’d become attorneys, daughters who’d become patrons of the arts, and live in the shadow of Harvard University, thereby continuing her privileged, purebred Irish-Catholic legacy.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Dolores becomes a Long Island housewife married to a salesman, and must watch as all her children embrace lives and lifestyles quite different from what she had imagined. After all, did she ever expect one daughter to become a radio shock jock and one son to become a hard-drinking New York City cop? And then there’s the other son, a sarcastic cartoonist who’s missing a leg due to a terrible childhood accident. That, of course, was never part of the plan.

One day, the boy who used to live across the street, and is now a successful journalist, oversees Dolores hugging a six-year-old, olive-skinned girl—and smiling! That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would come naturally to Dolores.

Almost Like Praying consists of three separate stories the curious journalist reconstructs: one about the family’s Massachusetts and Long Island roots, another about the troubled early adulthood of the eldest son, and the last which details the curious relationship between Dolores and that little girl.

Joel began in journalism at age 17 as a stringer for his hometown newspaper on Long Island, and continued training in college as a reporter and arts reviewer. His first position after college was as an assistant editor on trade magazines, and he then moved into marketing communications for several firms as an account executive, public relations manager and employee communications writer. As a journalist, his work has appeared in Connecticut Magazine, Pittsburgh Magazine and dozens of others. He is the author of the 2019 novel Blowin' in the Wind as well as four nonfiction books including Some Kind of Lonely Clown: The Music, Memory & Melancholy Lives of Karen Carpenter, which followed a report about Ms. Carpenter that he wrote and narrated for NPR's All Things Considered.