BY KAREN BOSSICK
Callie Kingman enjoyed idyllic years at Princeton University. But she begrudgingly followed her husband Thomas across the country as he pursued his career at the expense of her own only to have him leave her with no job prospects in Sacramento, which she considered “the dullest city in America,”
“It’s not me, it’s you,” was his parting shot.
Ketchum author Alli Frank and her co-writer Asha Youmans chronicle what happens next as Callie takes to bed, relying on delivery for food, her neighbor for booze and her best friend for commiseration in their new book “Run for Your Life, Callie Kingman.”
The witty, celebratory novel, which launches today—Dec. 30—is their fifth. And they describe it as a revelatory love letter to Gen X women everywhere.
The book is told in dual timeline between Princeton University in the ‘90s and modern-day Sacramento so the reader experiences all the LOVES mentioned and how they differ between young adulthood and middle age.
“Within these pages, we did our best to explore many of the varying loves that exist in most people’s lives,” said Frank. “Love of hometown. Familial love. Love of camaraderie and lifelong friendships. Intimate love. And most important, self-love.”
Frank and Youmans wrote their first book “Tiny Imperfections,” about a Black woman who lands the chance to control white students’ fate as director of admissions at an elite private school, in 2020. Over the next few years they added “Boss Lady,” “The Better Half” and “Never Meant to Meet You” about the unlikely friendship between a Jewish woman and a somewhat meddling Black Baptist that was an Amazon bestseller.
All are sassy, somewhat irreverent stories of smart, driven women—their challenges encouraging conversations about such issues as race, religion, career, culture, class, privilege, education and parenting.
All their books are dotted with humor, as well. In “Run for Your Life,” for instance, Callie takes her 87-year-old mother with dementia to an Apple store to fix her computer, only to have a porn video assault her eardrums when the repairman turns on her mother’s computer.
“Asha and I are both Gen X women and we wanted to write a LOVE story to middle age,” said Frank. “Not a romance but a true LOVE STORY because by your 40s onward every person, if they are lucky, has multiple loves in their life. Love of family, love of friendship - those that are decades old and those that are new, love of home town, intimate love and, most importantly if a person is supremely lucky, self-love.
“Additionally, we wanted to explore what a hard-fought comeback looks like in middle age when time is not as much on your side and digging deep and working hard to make big changes feels like exactly that--major work at a time in life where some may be hoping to ride a more earned, smooth ride.”
Frank, a graduate of Cornell and Stanford universities, met Youmans when they worked together at a private school in Seattle. They penned their first book long distance as the COVID pandemic slowed the life they were accustomed to.
They still write that way, calling, texting and spending hours on Facetime. They have a leapfrog method of writing where one writes a few chapters and sends it to the other. That person then works on the characters’ emotions or dialog and sends it back to the other.
“Even though this book is very much a story closer to our hearts given where we are in our lives, of our five books this one was by far the most challenging to write,” said Frank. “We had 110 pages down, four-plus months of solid work and we had to abandon the direction we were going and start over from scratch, staring again at the blank page because what we had was not working.
“We tried to fix what we had, but just couldn’t get there and we knew there was a story somewhere in our words we really wanted to tell, so we went back to square one.”
“Run for Your Life, Callie Kingman” is available at Iconoclast Books in Hailey, as well as all major online book retailers.