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On the eve of her thirty-seventh birthday, former voice-over artist Fran Clark finds herself in a role she could never have envisioned: that of a surprisingly desperate housewife, suffocating in her life despite, or because of, her ad-exec husband and two children. She’s far too cynical to take suburban life too seriously—“if it weren’t for the Happy Meal, several thousand women would have murdered their children”—yet she can’t seem to stop herself from entering a panicky, drink-enhanced spiral downward to rock-bottom depression. It will take her children and her two best friends counting on her more than they’d ever dreamed for her to find the inner strength to rebuild her life.

Fran’s completely flawed yet charming personality narrates this funny, self-deprecating tale about one woman’s brutally candid trip to the brink and back.