Trailer Park Tuesday: Highs in the Low Fifties by Marion Winik

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

If there was ever a time we need a compass and a map, middle age is it.  I'm happily married so divorce is not even a fleeting thought for me; but, as with everyone, the possibility of widowhood looms like a heavy black cloud that only seems to build and darken the older I get.  I can't imagine having to be back out on the "meat market" (though, by this point, it's probably something closer to liver and onions than filet mignon).  Marion Winik, a commentator for NPR's All Things Considered, knows all about widowhood--and divorcehood, for that matter--and her stories about navigating her way across the meat market landscape are both funny and down-to-earth.  Poe Ballantine, author of Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, says Winik's new book, Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled through the Joys of Single Living, is "like laughing gas at a car accident."  In the trailer, Winik reads what I presume is an excerpt from the book with deadpan delivery, recalling her first failed romance: a pen-pal relationship with the jailed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. Winik was 9 years old. "Sadly, he never responded to my letters.  And then he was murdered in jail." Undeterred, she continued to forge ahead into, as the publisher's blurb tells us, "a series of ill-starred romantic experiences" with "her signature optimism, resilience, and poor judgment." Sometimes poor judgment is the best teacher.  I can't wait to learn from and laugh at/with Winik in the pages of Highs in the Low Fifties.  I'm hoping the book comes with a free compass.