COMING SOON!

Did You Have the Life You Wanted? (Sibylline Press, summer 2025). Spanning the generations from 1968 to 2018, this novel highlights the late 1960s to 1970s when diverse female friends confront the thwarted dreams and gender stereotypes of the nascent feminist movement. Writer and resident of New York’s Greenwich Village, Anita Rappaport grapples with lost opportunities and generational restrictions. As an older woman, she asks herself and her contemporaries the title question: “Did you have the life you wanted?” with often surprising and heart-wrenching responses.

Advance Praise

“Andrea Simon’s new novel, Did You Have the Life You Wanted? explores the challenges and rewards of both youthful self-discovery and mature introspection through the eyes of Anita Rappaport, a woman whose early life allowed her to experience the revolutionary heyday of the 1960s. The narrative offers a first-hand account of the turbulent, volatile American political scene whose energy, possibility and promise are later inflected by the musings of an elderly Anita taking stock of how her hopes and dreams played out over the decades. The resultant novel offers a rich account of one woman’s coming to terms with her life story. Did You Have the Life You Wanted? takes its reader deep into the mind and heart of a woman whose life trajectory has proven both surprising and heartbreaking, inspiring, and tragic.” —Mary Caputi, Ph.D., feminist, professor, and author of Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory

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“A poignant and witty novel about a young woman from Brooklyn over some fifty years of her life with a group of stalwart friends who meet in the 1960s during the time of women’s liberation, city race riots, a gritty Greenwich Village, and a rough, dirty subway. Some women change as time goes by, some leave the circle early, some last to the end. Through the book Anita, through stories and her camera, records the idiosyncrasies of her family, her jobs, and eventually her husband, her children, and her friends, asking herself, “Did you have the life you wanted?” Original and deftly written, the author brings an earlier New York to life. A moving and fascinating story.” —Stephanie Cowell, author of The Boy in the Rain, Claude and Camille and The Man in the Stone Cottage, recipient of an American Book Award

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“Andrea Simon’s latest book is a breath of fresh air: familiar and yet new. This excellent novel paints an engrossing story of a late twentieth-century examined life. Although psychologically sophisticated, it is written in a colloquial voice easy to access and to enjoy. Some readers will nod in happy recognition; all will be engrossed. What begins as a young woman leaving Brooklyn after graduating from college and coming to live in Greenwich Village continues far beyond, reaching into middle and old age. The readable plot celebrates the power of female friendship through the vicissitudes of life: childhood traumas, a horrific attempted gang rape, career hurdles, and then fulfillment, a reluctant blind date that leads to a long loving marriage, the loss of friends and family to sickness and suicide, and the lucid description of her own cancer. When her usually stoic husband hears the diagnosis, he bursts into tears. The story recreates familiar sights, occurrences, and smells of Americana. New Yorker to the core, the protagonist Anita shops at bygone stores like Lord & Taylor, lives on historic Roosevelt Island, mistakenly thinks Long Island City is in Long Island (it’s in Queens), brings up the old 1960s mantra ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty.’ …Anita is vulnerable but gutsy…. Family conflict is exposed with no sugar coating, including the difficult relationship with her demanding critical mother, and her ever cruel brother…. From frenetic youth to contemplative maturity, Anita unites with old friends in person, by correspondence, or by memory. She concludes, ‘Well, here we are, two old broads from Flatbush...That’s the beauty of old age.…We can do what we want.’ “—-Helen Schary Motro, author of The Right to Happiness: After All They Went Through and Maneuvering between the Headlines: An American Lives through the Intifada.  “

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“Andrea Simon’s vivid novel, Did You Have the Life You Wanted?, recounts the lives, the choices, and the inabilities to choose of narrator Anita Rappaport and her wide group of friends. Tracing the social and cultural upheavals of the ‘60s through the new millennium, this provocative novel will urge readers of any age to ponder their own pasts and the underlying forces that shaped their lives — patterns that are often indecipherable until they look back closely on the decades they have lived in.”—Ruth Pennebaker, author of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough and co-author of Pucker Up! The Subversive Woman’s Guide to Aging

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“Andrea Simon’s Did You Have the Life You Wanted? hooks you with startling events early on and keeps you reading with tightly written, kaleidoscopic, wise storytelling; and as a tribute to pre-2025 America, it promises to prove more important and relevant to post-2025 America than today’s readers can imagine.” —Mark Wisniewski, Founding Editor of Coolest American Stories, author of Necessary Deeds

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“Did You Have the Life You Wanted? is an insightful tour of over fifty years of American cultural history as seen through the eyes of a Jewish feminist in New York City. The novel takes us on a sweeping journey, beginning in 1968 and ending in 2019. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist, Anita Rappaport, age 22, moves from her parents’ home in Brooklyn and works as a caseworker for the city’s Department of Social Services until a violent incident sends her on a divergent path of self-exploration. Anita flees to Europe for a while, then returns to a more bohemian way of life among friends and lovers in Greenwich Village…. As the years unfold, Anita struggles to find a place for herself in a rapidly changing society marked by race riots, civil rights and anti-war movements, growing feminist awareness, political activism, and the widespread challenging of social norms…. Her experiences mirror those of countless other women in the baby boom era, which is why the novel is so relevant and vital …. The characters are rendered with warmth and affection; Anita is very empathetic. Novelist Andrea Simon has a brilliant way of poking fun at Anita and all the many wonderful minor characters in the book without disparaging them. Simon’s dialogue is full of wit. She is a master at using humor to explore serious themes. Did You Have the Life You Wanted? is entertaining, far-reaching, and wise.”—Katherine Kirkpatrick, author of To Chase the Glowing Hours  

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