Get ready to have all your illusions of the glamorous Italian expat life shattered in this hilarious, irreverent memoir of a young American woman’s romantic (or rather, unromantic) misadventures in the eternal city. Handsome, charming Roman men; perfectly made cappuccino and risotto; breathtakingly beautiful antiquities and that incomparable Italian light–none of these are perhaps quite as idyllic as they might seem to the casual traveler. With a jaded eye but an always vulnerable heart, Geoghegan gives us the anti-Eat, Pray, Love, a tale every bit as atmospheric but way funnier than the runaway best-seller. This is what life in Italy really looks like when you’re a 30-something woman running from grief and trying to find her way back to love.

In these two tales of obsessive love, Elizabeth Geoghegan, author of “The Marco Chronicles,” creates vivid portraits of strong women blinded by a weakness for a certain kind of guy–heartless, but impossible to resist. Whether her heroines are caught up in the chaos of Bangkok or lured into the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, they struggle to find their way in a world where disaster is a natural consequence of the urgency of desire. In these dark, lyric stories, women meet life and their own instincts head on.