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Can life be beautiful after it breaks?

Betsy Thacker knows good art, bad taste, and how to find fault with practically anything. But recognizing beauty in herself has always been another matter.

At fifty-five, she returns to Honey Grove, Texas, the small town she left decades ago, with a prison sentence behind her and little enthusiasm for a second act. Her art-world career is gone. Her now-grown children are estranged. An attempt to end her life has failed. Betsy’s merciless inner voice, Woolf, is vulgar and relentless, offering running commentary on her failures and life's indignities.

But Honey Grove begins to interfere with Betsy’s determined defeat. A tattoo artist unsettles her ideas about art. Local kids need guidance. The old Biscuit Barn offers possibilities she would’ve once dismissed. A friendship that began in prison survives outside of it. Art gives Betsy’s mind new traction, her days new meaning. And Henry, a painter with an inconvenient capacity for tenderness, is interested in the woman Betsy would prefer to hide. Each connection presents a challenge that punishment never did: believing she might still deserve the beauty of being alive.

Moving between her past and her tentative return to life, The Art of Being Betsy traces the distance between accepting responsibility and accepting the love still possible. Sharp, darkly funny, and tender, this is a story of human frailty and failure, of unexpected beauty, and of the courage it takes to forgive ourselves.

I love this novel! Is life over at 55 — especially if you've finished serving a prison sentence? Or is it just easier on yourself to think so? Marlett's wise and tender new novel presents an audaciously original heroine who returns to her small Texas town, struggling to make sense of her past mistakes and find closure, all while entering a future she never saw coming. A beautiful book!

— Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder

“In rich prose that borders on hypnotic poetry, David Marlett chronicles the life of a character tragically familiar in our modern age, one whose negative self-talk has assumed a life of its own — and yet our Betsy never gives up on the possibilities midlife has to offer, the great love lying at the core of reinvention and renewal. This is a wonderful read that will linger for decades in readers’ hearts.”

— Peter Telep, New York Times bestselling author with Tom Clancy