WELCOME
Welcome! If you've ever been blindsided by a Post-it note, eaten something questionable on a kitchen floor, or quietly suspected that the best part of your life hasn't happened yet, you're in the right place.
I'm SM Wagner, and I write stories about women who've been underestimated — by the world, by the people around them, and sometimes by themselves. These aren't coming-of-age stories. They're coming-of-rage stories. About women with laugh lines and battle scars, maxed-out credit cards and empty refrigerators, who discover — usually on the worst Tuesday of their lives — that the skills nobody valued were the ones worth everything.
Have a look around. Find your next book. Your laundry will still be there when you get back. It always is.
WHICH BOOK IS YOUR STARTING POINT?
Two books. Two women. Two spectacular implosions. Same satisfying journey from the floor to the front of the room. Pick your disaster and dive in.
My husband drained every account and fled to Belize with a woman named Tiffani. Start with Starting Over at Fifty-Three. Viv Calloway is fifty-three, abandoned, and sitting on her kitchen floor eating Oreos when a biological father she's never met shows up on her porch with a saxophone and a duffel bag. What follows involves a resumé that mentions a live frog, a computer instructor with distractingly good forearms, a best friend who categorizes wine by emotional crisis, and the stubborn discovery that twenty-five years of running a household might actually be a marketable skill. Funny, fierce, and deeply satisfying.
My boss fired me with a Post-it note. Then my husband tried the same trick. Start with Unraveled at Forty-Five.Jules Brennan has spent twelve years as Pasadena's most poised local news anchor and twenty-two years as the most organized wife in California. Then both careers end on the same cheap yellow paper. What follows involves a seventy-two-year-old mother with a pottery wheel and zero filter, a childhood neighbor who waited, and the slow, stubborn discovery that the life you didn't plan might be the one you were always meant to have. Sharp, warm, and wickedly funny.
More books are on their way. The women of the Sorry-Not-Sorry series aren't finished yet — and neither is SM Wagner.
DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT
I could tell you these books will make you laugh, cry, and text your best friend at midnight. But I'm biased. Here's what readers are saying instead. (Oh wait! There are no reviews yet. Leave a review on Amazon and yours could be the first!)
STAY IN THE LOOP (AND AVOID FOLDING LAUNDRY)
Sign up for SM Wagner's newsletter and you'll get first looks at new books, behind-the-scenes confessions about the writing life, the occasional strong opinion about perennials, and dispatches from the Canadian prairies where the winters are long and the to-do list is aspirational at best. No spam. No sales pitches. Just the good stuff, delivered with humor and heart — and full permission to ignore whatever else you're supposed to be doing right now.
ABOUT SM WAGNER
SM Wagner writes stories about women who discover — often later than expected — that the best chapter might be the one they write for themselves. Her characters aren't twenty-two and discovering life for the first time. They're women with expired coupons at the bottom of their purses and the quiet, stubborn suspicion that maybe the wreckage is where the good stuff begins.
SM writes from her home on the beautiful Canadian prairies, where the winters are long, the skies are endless, and the laundry is somebody else's problem — as stated in the household contract.
Now that you know SM's secrets, go meet her characters. Fair warning — they're louder than she is, and far less well-behaved.