Both Sides Now
Both Sides Now is a historical fictional novel about the friendship between two women who grow up during the turmoil and transitions of the early 60’s and 70’s and later reunite, after many life changes, to form an unbreakable life bond. I am the best person to write this book because I am one of those two women. The target audience is adult women’s fiction.
Lacey Pierce and Mimi Faraday grew up in a quaint New England town in the early 1960’s just outside Boston, home to a well-known prep school they both attended. After Mimi’s wedding to Chapin, the married couple move to Saint John’s, Newfoundland to become community volunteers while Lacey joins the Peace Corps in Africa. They are all young, liberal and lively.
Late in the summer of 1995 Lacey Pierce encounters Mimi among the homeless while serving in a soup kitchen in a Boston cathedral. After twenty five years in Newfoundland, Mimi has returned to Boston, penniless, become homelessness and lives in a halfway house for abused women. The novel parallels journeys of the two women over the intervening decades.
The title of the book comes from the classic song by Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now: I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow, It’s life’s illusions I recall, I don’t know life at all.