YOU COULD BE HOME BY NOW

You Could Be Home By Now explores the fallout for all involved, taking on the themes of grief and memory, aspiration and social class, self-deception and the drive in all of us to find a place to belong.

An hour and a half outside Tucson, Arizona, The Commons is a luxury retirement community where no full time resident under the age of fifty-five is permitted. Young professionals Seth and Alison Collier accept jobs there as a means of dealing (badly) with a recent loss. When a struggling resident, underwater on her mortgage and unable to relocate due to the nation's ongoing housing crisis, is discovered to be raising her grandson in secret, the story—with the help of a well-meaning teenaged beauty blogger and a retiree with reasons of his own to seek the spotlight—goes viral. Tracy Manaster is a graduate of Wesleyan University and The Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was the 2006 recipient of the National League of American Pen Women's Joanna Catherine Scott prize for novel excerpt. Her nonfiction has appeared in Iagora and Moxie magazines and as interactive exhibit texts for The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and twin daughters.