How I Made a Huge Mess of My Life: (or Couples Therapy with a Dead Man)

Billie Best's memoir is a provocative, at times hilarious, account of her midlife mistakes and misadventures, and how they build her strength as she copes with her soul mate turned cheating husband who wants his death to be performance art, his doppelganger mistress who wants to steal her identity, and the financial collapse of the farm she loves. An inspiring tale of a woman's rites of passage from her 40s to her 60s when everything in her life changes.

Most of the story takes place in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts where Best and her husband purchased a farm in 1998 as a second home after her success in the technology business. The book charts their course from high tech city people to low tech farm folk as it exposes the fissures in their marriage brought on by diverging visions for the future, her immersion into farming and his escape into an affair.

Three months before his death he invites his until then secret mistress to spend the weekend with him and Best. It's his goodbye present to himself and it doesn't go well. Best's emotional scars are permanent, triggering a cascade of rage, neurosis and obsessive-compulsive cleaning. It takes years for her to unravel the lies buried in their marriage. Then she discovers some forgotten secrets of her own.

An illumination of a woman's power in midlife, Best's memoir is a gutsy saga of how a marriage breaks down after 30 years, what to do (and not to do) when your husband cheats on you, how to deal with a midlife crisis, how to plan your own funeral and die at home, how to move forward after becoming a widow, and the personal renaissance of downsizing and starting over - in short, this book is about how to age well.