Born Lucky
Category Author

$19.00

Born Lucky

by Sarah McElwain

“Before the dark side of the Internet and TikTok, there were the false promises of TV and the tabloids. Part love affair, part loss of innocence, part plight of a teenage girl immersed in survival, BORN LUCKY invites the reader into the tragic, naive truth about how popular culture devours teenage girl.”

—Susannah Marren, author of Maribelle's Shadow

  “Sarah McElwain brings the bad old East Village of the nineties totally alive again – sights, sounds, culture, and more than that, its very soul. Filtered through the eyes of a teenage girl growing up there, in a story that is wry and bittersweet.”

—Jonathan Stone, author of Moving Day and The Prison Minyan

 

Sarah McElwain

Sarah McElwain teaches at Pulitzer-prize winning poet Philip Schultz’s Writers Studio. For ten years she was a co-host of Writers Read NYC in Greenwich Village. Her essay “Fingertips Part Three with Thanks to Stevie Wonder” about teaching yoga for the blind is in The Art of Touch, University of Georgia Press (2023). Her collection, Saying Grace, Blessings for the Family Table, and how-to guide To the Happy Couple, Creating a Great Wedding Toast with Style were published by Chronicle Books.

Choose the rabbit’s foot for luck,
but consider what happened to the rabbit.
~ proverb

Evening K. Titlebaum believed that she was lucky. She had no evidence to support this. She did not, however, believe that Luck was just going to fly in through the window one day and find her, and so she spends her days and nights searching through magazines and tabloids for contests and sweepstakes to enter. Luck rewards persistence and no one is out there working harder to attract Luck than Evening. What Evening likes most about Luck is that it requires no special skill or talent. Luck can strike anyone, anywhere, anytime. And Luck is often blind to beauty. Evening sees no contradiction in believing that Luck is both random and blind. And that some people are born luckier than others. She’s got a date with Luck. She just knows it. Any minute there could be a flash of light—Luck’s diamond cufflink!—as he reaches down with his long, elegant finger and taps her on the shoulder.