the missing link

At work last year one of my co-workers kindly showed me a book called "The Link." It's about a newlywed couple who get into an accident and the woman goes for help because she thinks her husband is dying and she gets lost in the forest and runs into a Big Foot-type character and they get it on and she has to decide if she wants to go back to her husband or stay with this man of the woods.

Sounds amazing, doesn't it?

We laughed our heads off then and, every so often, I'll see it and have to take it off the shelf to look at the horrifyingly bad cover art and/or the '80s artist picture. I mean, she has puffy '80s hair that would make New Jersey women weep from jealousy, is wearing a white jumpsuit with a circular pattern of studs on the shoulders and shoulder pads. Ugh. And she's reading a dictionary while editing something.

Anyway, back to the story.

So, I was just talking with my friend about the book because he's all into missing link animals and that made me think of "The Link." Yesterday I found it on the shelf, had a good laugh with my co-workers, and opened it up, just to look at when it was published (1995). And there I see the publisher's address. It's the same town I'm from. Er.... OK. It has to be self-published. Then I look at the dedication list. The second name is one of my friends from kindergarten whom I lived with for a year and then stopped talking to because she had her boyfriend move in with us and he ate all my steak (back when my parents bought me meat because they were worried I wasn't eating well enough) and wouldn't pay for it, and she nickel and dimed me for groceries her mom bought for her in the States that she wanted me to pay for because I might use milk, even though her fricking boyfriend ate it all. (But I'm not bitter.)

Anyway, her name is the second name and then it dawns on me... The woman who wrote the book is her mother-in-law.

So now I'm trying to get the book discarded from the collection so I can send it to my friend, but also because it should have been out of the collection anyway since it circulated three (3) times in the last 11 years. Three times! That's just sad. Oh, and because I'm bitter about that steak.

I'll try to remember to post the writer's statement from the back of the book. So bad. It involves exclamation marks and all-caps towards the end. Enough said.