Like most advertising copywriters, I always dreamed of writing a book in my spare time. Unlike most advertising copywriters, I actually did it. And got published. And won the Chicago Writers Association's "Book of the Year" award in the traditional non-fiction category.
We Hope You Like this Song is a memoir about an amazing friendship I was lucky enough to experience, and how I coped when that friendship was taken away from me, suddenly, at the age of twenty-five.
Full synopsis:
From fourth grade onward, shy, nervous Bree Housley and fearless, outgoing Shelly were an inseparable, albeit unlikely, pair. Their friendship survived everything from the awkward years of junior high to the transformative upheavals of early adulthood—until, at the young age of 25, Shelly lost her life to complications caused by Preeclampsia.
We Hope You Like This Song is a tribute to the ineffable, incomparable bond that we call friendship, and a celebration of living life to the fullest. Housley recounts how she and her sister found a way to keep Shelly’s memory alive—by spending a year doing crazy things that Shelly would have done, like giving Valentines to strangers, singing at a karaoke bar, and letting her boyfriend pick out her outfits for a week. In the process, she paints a vivid, often hilarious, portrait of her fun-loving, social butterfly best friend and the many adventures they had growing up together in '80s and ’90s small-town America. Sweet, poignant, and yet somehow laugh-out-loud funny, We Hope You Like This Song is a touching story of love, loss, and the honoring of a friendship after it’s gone.