I was born. At the usual age and in the usual manner, at least so I've been told. It's not like I remember it personally, which is probably a good thing all told, what with the squeezing and screaming and crying and all.
It's just one more thing I have to take on faith, another thing I'm not particularly good at.
In any case, it’s always been just my mom and me, but since I’m not much of a believer in virgin birth or parthenogenesis (see Mom, I do pay attention in biology class! Well, at least sometimes...) I’ve always assumed Dad was out there somewhere.
I even have a small strip of pictures of him and Mom in some photo booth at a casino in Vegas. They both look kind of drunk but really happy, which I supposed explains a lot. Me in particular. Or at least my aforementioned birth nine months later.
But as I was saying, Dad’s never been in the picture—or outside of the Vegas ones, if you take my meaning—and while I’m not thrilled with the idea, for the most part I don’t dwell on it. It’s just my life, such as it is.
With a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her mom to reinvent herself and get her life back on the track she's been on prior to Gwen's unplanned birth, on the line, Gwen is determined to find her father and give back to her Mom the life she'd always planned for herself.
With nothing more than the Las Vegas photo strip to go on, she finds help in the most unlikely of places, a bored private detective whose office is a Jewish Delicatessen, a Vice Principal whose secret Demotivational Poster features a Star Wars Storm Trouper sitting dejected in a bar with the title FAILURE: Those were the droids you were looking for, and of course her best friend Peter, who introduces her to the novel idea of sending a postcard.
At times poignant, heartbreaking and joyously absurd, Gwen's story is about a young woman trying to understand her past, her present, and how it and the people in it will all fit together in the future she's creating.
