What Nora Knew

Praise for

WHAT NORA KNEW

“Linda Yellin’s feisty heroine Molly Hallberg is sassy, cynical, irreverent, and hysterically funny. With a wounded heart and gimlet eye, Molly delivers razor-sharp observations on love and fear that have us completely identifying with her, and crackling, witty dialogue that’s so damn entertaining I wish Yellin would start writing screenplays.”

—Claire Fontaine, author of
Come Back

“Linda Yellin has given us a tart, funny, totally lovable heroine whose path to true love is hilarious and heartwarming. Nora Ephron would have loved this book.”

—Jenny Allen, essayist,
The New Yorker’s Disquiet, Please!

“Could someone please apologize to my husband and children for ignoring them all weekend as I gobbled up this delicious book? I loved every minute of it.”

—Karen Bergreen, author of
Perfect Is Overrated

“Linda’s lively story sparkles and dances off the page.”

—Tracey Jackson, author of
Between a Rock and a Hot Place

“Linda Yellin has written an irresistibly funny, authentic novel about the two-steps-forward-one-step-back pursuit of life, love, and career in New York City. She writes for all of us with Molly Hallberg’s laugh-out-loud, poignant inability to accept she’s met her equal, while everyone around her takes the plunge. Yellin is a Nora Ephron–inspired humorist with a voice of her own.”

—Kathryn Leigh Scott, author of
Down and Out in Beverly Heels

“I laughed my way through Linda Yellin’s
What Nora Knew
—when I wasn’t nodding in recognition. Witty, wise, insightful, and altogether charming.”

—Emily Listfield, author of
Best Intentions

“Linda Yellin’s novel is by turns touching and funny, and her heroine has charm and chutzpah to spare.”

—Christina Haag, author of
Come to the Edge: A Love Story

Praise for

THE LAST BLIND DATE

“
The Last Blind Date
is a laugh-out-loud funny, nakedly revealing, kooky look at romance told with sweetness and soul. From the minute our hero Randy picks up our heroine Linda at the airport with his fly accidentally unzipped, and takes her to his friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, where he mistakenly calls her by the name of his ex-wife, it’s impossible not to root for their love.”

—Susan Shapiro, author of
Five Men Who Broke My Heart

“
The Last Blind Date
is a valentine for optimism, risk-taking, and love itself. With self-deprecating charm, Yellin takes her reader on a journey from Chicago to Manhattan, eviscerating New York City folkways with gentle yet biting wit.”

—Sally Koslow, author of
The Widow Waltz

“Yellin’s story is not only a delight to read but an inspiring example of the good that can come from taking risks.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“
The Last Blind Date
is a candid and charmingly funny account of love. Linda Yellin’s sympathy, wit, and nerve make her determined forging of a family a success, and this book about it completely winning.”

—Hilma Wolitzer, author of
An Available Man

“Filled with lots of girl-talk, this memoir will appeal to readers who just can’t get enough of the beginning, middle, and sweet endings of love stories.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Linda Yellin’s modern love story will leave you laughing ’til it hurts.”

—Sam Apple, author of
American Parent

“I keep on trying to think who I can compare this to, but you really can’t. I can say Erma Bombeck but younger, Chelsea Handler but kinder, but that doesn’t do the book justice. It’s a voice that is unique and compelling.”

—Amazon Review by Total Stranger

Praise for

SUCH A LOVELY COUPLE

“Yellin has a gift for moving the plot along and imbuing a familiar tale with freshness and humor. A good read from a writer with the wit and verve of Susan Isaacs.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Such a rare, ringing clarity of tone and vision. The emotions, the dialogue, the scenery are just dead on.”

—Susan Kenney, author of
In Another Country

“Warm and funny and honest.”

—Ann Hood, author of
The Obituary Writer

For Randy Arthur—

I love you so much it’s ridiculous.

There’s no one who’s more romantic than a cynic.

—Nora Ephron,
Rolling Stone
magazine

Ten minutes after saying “I do” at the Garden City Hotel in Long Island, I was already having my doubts. But how do you say “I don’t” to a man who’s considered
quite the catch.
Everyone was constantly telling me—even strangers—that Evan Naboshek, of the firm Naboshek, Halla, and Weiss, was a fabulous hell of a prize.

In answer to the question, should anyone ask, “So how’d you two lovebirds meet?”—it started when lovebird #1 stepped out of a cab into a puddle. I was trying to open my umbrella at the same time I was juggling my grocery bags, spilling tomatoes, peppers, onions, three frozen-lemonade cans, and a dozen eggs onto the sidewalk. A dashing stranger went dashing after my produce, holding his umbrella aloft like Don Quixote.

That’s all it took. I fell in love.

Evan has all the tall, dark, and gorgeous attributes that add up to trouble. The deep-set eyes. The Roman nose. The square jaw that I later wanted to slug. Despite the rain, his custom-made suit looked perfectly pressed, and when he handed over a runaway onion, I noticed his French cuffs with the gold links and that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band. Not that a bare finger’s any indication of a man’s availability, but at least you’ve got a fifty-fifty shot.

Balancing his umbrella over both our heads, Evan helped me restuff my plastic grocery bags and escorted me to the corner garbage can, where I ceremoniously dumped the sticky egg carton. The tomatoes, peppers, and onions also met their maker. The dented lemonade cans survived, but my dignity was a goner.
Rain will wash away the mess,
my knight in shiny tailoring assured me, his words sounding like a song lyric. I pictured droplets dancing around Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard; rain cascading over Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell. I wanted to sing:
The sun will come out tomorrow!

Back then, I was still capable of dreams.

“Next on your agenda?” my rescuer asked, his smile revealing the best set of veneers this side of a TV anchorman.

I opened my umbrella. “Home,” I said, nodding at my apartment building, your basic white-brick Upper East Side building. “I splurged on a cab so I wouldn’t get my groceries wet.”

“Well, that didn’t go well.” He laughed. But not an at-me laugh, more of an at-the-situation laugh.

Beneath our now-adjoining umbrellas, he told me he was a partner in a law firm and would be happy to help me sue
Mother Nature should my grocery debacle result in whiplash, adding, though, that he didn’t usually specialize in curbside accidents. His expertise was divorce.

If only I’d listened.

I thanked him for pursuing my salad ingredients and said I could probably manage the last twenty steps without requiring legal aid. He invited me for coffee to help me de-chill from the rain.

“You aren’t a married divorce lawyer, are you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I’m a happily divorced divorce lawyer.”

Like I said, trouble, trouble, trouble.

He waited in my lobby while I hurried upstairs, jammed my lemonade cans into my freezer, googled him, changed out of my wet shoes and shirt, spent three minutes blow-drying my hair into a semblance of presentable, and returned downstairs.

Evan was talking into his cell phone and held up two fingers to indicate he’d only be two minutes. Except he was still on the phone fifteen minutes later, so maybe what he was really doing was making a peace sign. While I sat in the chair opposite his, I waved hello to my neighbor, Mrs. McBriarty, who was passing by on her walker. I went and checked my mailbox, then came back and sat down again across from my future husband.

On the phone Evan sounded like a real hardnose, demanding this, outraged at that, saying things like
This matter is not closed! If you want to go to court, my client’s happy to go to court!
He insisted on the house in the Berkshires and the
condo in Aspen, and that the lease be paid off on the Lexus immediately. But when he did look up at me, he had this warm smile on his face. He mouthed,
Just one second,
then went back to being Mr. Kick-Ass Tough Guy. In the early stages of our courtship, his ability to switch personalities on a dime seemed powerful and sexy, a masterful manipulation of mood and emotions, the key to his success in a courtroom. I later found myself bemoaning that nobody warned me I’d be married to Dr. Jekyll.

Warnings? Warnings? There were a million warnings, all of which I chose to ignore. I preferred to focus on the late-night dinners at Del Posto, Evan’s car-service Lincolns versus my subway MetroCard, his three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment (
so much nicer
than my crowded studio apartment), the barrage of red roses, and the juicy gossip about his clients’ nasty divorces. We’d call it lawyer-girlfriend privilege when he’d tell me off-the-record stories.

“Promise you’ll pretend I never told you this?” he’d say.

“Scout’s honor,” I’d say.

My Girl Scout leader Mrs. Tuke would have been ashamed of me.

Evan liked blabbing scuttlebutt as much as I liked hearing it. The man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Or his zipper. That little tidbit he did keep quiet.

I loved his smooth life. He loved my curvy butt. I loved the way he looked at me. He loved that I looked up to him. I didn’t question when Mr. Spill the Beans excused himself to take calls in private. I didn’t question his nonstop honeyed
words. I allowed myself to believe that I was so clever, so witty, that I was his one-woman sideshow.

And, oh, how he won over my family! He admired my mother’s arts and crafts, heaped flattery on my youngest sister Lisa’s punch recipe, complimented my sister Jocelyn’s insightful observations about the ailing euro, and volunteered to play Ping-Pong with my father. Twenty minutes after meeting the guy, my parents were wanting to book the caterers. I was almost thirty-one years old; it was time, they said, and I suppose I felt so, too.

When it came to track records for romance, I wasn’t what you’d call a gold medalist. My ability to find relationships hurtling nowhere was worthy of a Hubble telescope. Sophomore year at SUNY Albany, I fell head over boots (there’s lots of snow in Albany) for Glenn-with-two-
n
’s Crosse-with-an-
e
when we got into a debate in our Great American Writers class on the subject of Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf and geniuses committing suicide. Glenn argued on the side of genius leads to suicide. I argued on the side of that’s ridiculous. We dated for two years, most of it spent arguing. Last I heard, Glenn was a magician living in Colorado and selling hallucinogenic mushrooms.