Summary

Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, causes several physical deformities, and results in death around the age of forty.

Written as a deathbed letter to the UCLA physician who has tracked Nina and the other Good Thumbs throughout their lives, Nina recounts her final days with the group and with Cole, the charismatic, sadistic fellow A12er with whom she has fallen madly in love, who charms and harms her in equal measures. An unlikely alliance with a tech billionaire, the return of her estranged mother, and the birth of the baby she never thought she’d have force Nina to reckon with the triumphs and mistakes of her life and to fight to leave her child in good hands.

Author

Mo Daviau is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Daviau lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a bookseller.

Reviews

“In Epic and Lovely, Mo Daviau pushes against our expectations of the chronically ill. It’s a fully rendered look at chronic illness and difficult choices. Darkly funny and driven by the voice of Nina, whose voice is in turns sardonic, quirky, smart, and vulnerable, Epic and Lovely challenges our ideas about what it means to be sick in the modern world.”
—Renée K. Nicholson, coeditor of Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine

“Daviau is such a talented prose writer. Uproariously funny, singeing, authoritative. This is a skillful, sophisticated author writing with a scalpel on every line, willing to go to wild places. This story is a romp. Somehow we’re in the territory of farce, of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and of Eyes Wide Shut, all at the same time.”
—Courtney Sender, author of In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me: Stories