Fiction: Tales From My Hard Drive by Megan Karasch

At the very beginning of Tales From My Hard Drive, Melissa comes home from breakfast at an irritatingly hip Los Angeles noshery just in time to bust her husband playing at Cirque de Soliel with another woman in the backyard. “I left the house moments after I saw her run through the side gate and flee the scene, the driver of a pornographic hit-and-run, leaving me, the mangled victim, to clean up the mess.”

But Melissa opts not to hang around, heading instead to Manhattan in order to establish herself as “a forty-year-old writer in a city run by the young and hip.” The best she can do is find work as a cyber-dater for a newspaper where she will anonymously date and harshly review a city full of Mr. Wrongs. Unsurprisingly, it’s not long before she finds a Mr. Right or two. Or maybe not.

Though the set-up is slightly silly, the execution is quite charming, in a distinctly smart and sophisticated kind of way. Author Karasch is, apparently, a lawyer turned writer turned lawyer-writer (or something very like that) and so she comes by the smart and sophisticated honestly, an acerbic wit seems to be all her own. Both she and Melissa see humor in places not everyone would. The result is occasionally laugh-out-loud funny as we move through the 21st century dating world with a woman who has been out of circulation for a decade and a half, experiencing everything for the first time.

Tales From My Hard Drive is fun, fresh and absolutely current. Take this one to the beach: it’ll be tough to go wrong. ◊

Monica Stark is a contributing editor to January Magazine. She currently makes her home on a liveaboard boat somewhere in the North Pacific.