Liberal Ladies Who Lunch

Join us in July for a bite to eat and discuss the book, The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer.

From the day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during a dramatic telling of Peter Rabbit, Clover Brooks has felt a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living. After the beloved grandfather who raised her dies alone while she is traveling, Clover becomes a death doula in New York City, dedicating her life to ushering people peacefully through their end of life process.

Clover spends so much time with the dying that she has no life of her own, until the final wishes of a feisty old woman send Clover on a road trip across the country to uncover a forgotten love story—and perhaps, her own happy ending.

Our new member Marie is graciously offering her driveway and beach badges for lunch on the beach. Please bring your own lunch and drinks, and meet us at 501 Ellison Drive, Normandy Beach.

We will meet at 11 and walk 5 - 10 minutes to the beach.

I know everyone likes to share so if you truly do want to bring something small to share, please make sure it’s small. We won’t have room for anything extra. And it’s absolutely not necessary. I expect there will be six of us for lunch on the beach.

Other than that, join us with your beach chair, your towel, and anything else you’d like to have at the beach with you. Don’t forget the sunscreen and hat.!!!

Join us in September for a bite to eat and discuss Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

History is seldom kind. In Min Jin Lee’s bestselling, magisterial epic, four generations of a poor, proud immigrant family fight to control their destinies, exhiled from a homeland they never knew.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From the bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

Join us in November for a bite to eat and discuss the book, Absolution by Alice McDermott.

American women-American wives-have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to Navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery-of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions-have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.