Salad Days, Paperback

The nineties have just come to a close when newly married twenty-somethings Ana and Paul abandon their deep-set roots in Jersey and move out west to Portland, Oregon. Soon after they settle into the sleepy, new city, Ana starts hanging out with Drew, her new boss, a mellow, long-haired skateboarder from So-Cal and the complete opposite in temperament to feisty Paul. Drew and Ana become fast friends. And it's not long before everything that Ana thought she was building from scratch in a sluggish but thriving new city washes away with the relentless Northwest rains.

As she begins to settle in her new surroundings, Ana presses rewind and begins to come to terms with what she left behind on the East Coast. She zeros in on the time before she met Paul, back when she bartended through the heart of the nineties at Uncle Joe's Tavern, a famous indie rock venue on the Jersey side of the Hudson in close-knit and not-quite gentrified Milltown. Even though she fumbled her way through many an obsessive intimate relationship and struggled way too hard to make rent on barely habitable apartment shares, Ana remained held together by an epic music scene and a ragtag yet endearing crew from Uncle Joe's.

Salad Days vacillates between mid-nineties era Jersey and early aughts Portland, as we witness Ana trying desperately to be an adult, all the while attempting to repair a broken moral compass without an owner's manual.