Deborah K. Shepherd was born in Cambridge, MA and spent much of her early life in the New York area. Before retiring in 2014, she was a social worker with a primary focus on the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault, and provision of victim services. During an earlier career as a reporter, she wrote for Show Business in New York City and for the Roe Jan Independent, a weekly newspaper in Columbia County, New York. She also freelanced as a travel writer. She graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, and holds a BFA in drama from the University of Arizona and an MSW from the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. Deborah lives with her husband and two rescue dogs on the coast of Maine, where she gardens, cooks, swims, reads, entertains her grandsons, tries to speak French, and blogs at www.deborahshepherdwrites.com and www.paleogram.com. She is currently at work on a memoir.

As her stultifying marriage to Jack is unravelling and she is mourning the loss of her creative self, Caro has a nightmare about Peter, an old love whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years. She takes this as a sign he still needs her and—with her three children safely off at summer camp—embarks on a pre-Facebook, pre-cell phone road trip to recapture who she once was and what she thinks she once had.

Set in the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll ’60s of Tucson, Arizona, when Caro and Peter were kooky, colorful, and inseparable, and in the suburban ’80s, when Caro’s creative spark has been quashed to serve the needs of her husband and children, So Happy Together explores the conundrum of love and sexual attraction, creativity and family responsibilities, and what happens when they are out of sync. It is a story of missed opportunities, the tantalizing possibility of second chances, and what we leave behind, carry forward, and settle for when we choose. It sits in that raw, messy, confounding, beautiful place where love resides.