Kiss Tomorrow Hello
 Edited by Kim Barnes and Claire Davis

A collection of blazingly honest, smart, and often humorous essays on middle age contributed by well-known writers such as Julia Glass, Joyce Maynard, Lolly Winston, Antonya Nelson, Diana Abu-Jaber, Judy Blunt, Lauren Slater, and other voices of the baby boom generation.

In the tradition of the bestselling A Bitch in the House, Kiss Tomorrow Hello brings together the experiences and reflections of women as they embark on a new stage of life. Many women in their forties, fifties, and sixties discover that they are racing uphill, trying desperately to keep their romantic and social lives afloat just as those things they believe constant start to shift: The body begins its inevitable decline, sometimes gracefully, sometimes less so…

The twenty-five stellar writers gathered here explore a wide range of concerns, including keeping love (and sex) alive, discovering family secrets, negotiating the demands of illness and infertility, letting children go, making peace with parents, and contemplating plastic surgery. The tales are true, the confessions candid, and the humor infectious—just what you’d expect from the women whose works represent the best writings of their generation. From Lynn Freed’s wry “Happy Birthday to Me” to Pam Houston’s hilarious “Coffee Dates with a Beefcake”; from Ellen Sussman's "Tearing Up the Sheets" to Julia Glass's "I Have a Crush on Ted Geisel," Kiss Tomorrow Hello is a wise, lyrical, and sexy look at the pleasures and perils of midlife.

Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs: In the Wilderness, which won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, and Hungry for the World. Finding Caruso, a novel, was published in 2003. She teaches at the University of Idaho.

Claire Davis lives in Lewiston, Idaho, where she teaches writing at Lewis-Clark State College. Her first novel, Winter Range, received the MPBA and PNBA awards and her work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories. Davis's second novel, Season of the Snake, was published in 2005 to critical acclaim, and her collection of stories Labors of the Heart is forthcoming.