Good Girls Gone Bad

"Jillian Medoff takes an intriguing premise, turns it upside down, and sends it careening ahead, trailing delight and debauchery in its wake." — Maggie Estep

"A fact every actuary learns: Regardless of how many 'What, if" scenarios you design or assumptions you make, reality is always an ambush."

Janey Fabre is an actuary, a profession in which she's required to study mortality tables. She's also harboring a number of secrets -- about herself, her long-lost mother, and the way she stalks her ex-boyfriend Tobias through the streets of New York City.

Determined to get over Tobias and move on with her life, Janey joins group therapy. Once there, though, she's convinced the other women she meets are truly unbalanced. Suzanna prefers the company of her lap dog to human beings. Laura is a nymphomaniac. Bethany, a forty-year-old divorcee, still lives with her mother. Valentine, a painfully shy beauty, eats compulsively; Ivy, a sweet-talking southern belle, binges on Botox; and Natasha wears a facemask to protect herself from unseen pathogens. Of course, what the girls don't realize about quiet Janey is that she's haunted by her mother's disappearance and keeps in her purse a detailed list of suicide options.

Eventually, the girls learn to confide in each other and once empowered, dedicate themselves to collectively solving one another's problems. Like Janey, each woman is fearful of emotional intimacy. Their individual neuroses enable them to cope with this fear, and the result is as comedic as it is tragic. What begins as harmless mischief escalates into a vengeful prank that climaxes with a cracked skull on a boardroom table and surprising, deeply painful revelations, especially for Janey. How the girls gain control over themselves -- and each other -- is the driving force of this unabashedly funny and profoundly intelligent dark comedy.

A stunning tale of revenge and redemption, "Good Girls Gone Bad is a poignant, bittersweet mediation on family -- the families in our past, as well as the ones we create as adults."