Me Times Three

Everything’s going right for Sandra Berlin.

She is living in Manhattan, climbing the editorial ladder at ultra-chic fashion magazine Jolie!, and she’s just become engaged to Bucky Ross, her high-school sweetheart. Bucky’s her knight in shining WASP armor, a successful ad executive and a descendant of Betsy Ross, and their future promises a life of comfortable suburban bliss: the Tudor mansion, the beautiful children, the country club.

And then, three weeks later, at a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sandy meets Bucky’s other fiancée.

Who tells her about Bucky’s third fiancée.

Which begins Sandy’s journey through the unfamiliar world of heartbreak and betrayal—and the most excruciating blind dates in the history of singledom. As she tries to piece her life back together, she relies on the common sense and compassion of her best friend, Paul—a rising young film agent, gorgeous, gay, and moneyed—to keep her sane. But even Paul has his secrets, and soon Sandy is forced, on her own, to reexamine her past and, more important, what she wants for her future.

Me Times Three is comic and tender, outrageous and wise—a shrewd, dead-on portrait of a certain slice of New York life. It’s a story about wished-for ideals versus hard realities, about being who you are versus the desire to fit in, and, finally, about how love can surprise us in the most unexpected ways.

Alex Witchel, a Style reporter for the New York Times, is the author of Girls Only: Sleepovers, Squabbles, Tuna Fish and Other Facts of Family Life. She lives in New York City with her husband, Frank Rich.