66 LAPS

A sweet contemporary love story with an old-fashioned message, told by a young mother whose fears about getting old have

tragic consequences. Audrey Hastings, 32, lives in California, in the Valley. Husband Jim is a freelance set designer and builder, and while Jim works on movies and commercials, Audrey, a former champion swimmer, takes care of toddler Gina and tries to swim 66 laps—a mile—daily in their small pool. She's happy staying home with her daughter or spending time with other moms at the park, talking about their children, or strolling around the mall with Gina. She's happy, too, with Jim and, because her parents were bitterly divorced, is determined to remain married ("the only D word around here is death").But then she discovers some gray hairs and panics. Looking in the mirror, she realizes she’ll never be young again. And this insight, related in the easy, conversational, self-deprecating tone that makes Spirson’s tale so engaging and effective, becomes the worm in the rose. Now obsessed with her physical decline, Audrey relates how she suspects Jim of having an affair with his young assistant, Kim, and in revenge allows herself to be seduced by Sean, a handsome young grad student in the park selling ice cream from a truck. She unflinchingly details her guilt and the sad results of her behavior: she finds herself pregnant, and Jim learns about Sean. Audrey, however, is a survivor with a loving heart, and so is Jim. Will they both be able to move beyond her betrayal? Or manage to outlive a far worse tragedy yet to come?

Some schematic plotting, but Audrey speaks so compellingly from the heart that it can be forgiven.