Pitch and Synopsis:
We will all die one day. Can we accept this, do we need to, and what does accept mean?
Told in a nonlinear format, Leaving and Everything After (65,000 words) is a travel memoir that invites readers to analyze how one can accept death and what acceptance means. Tiffany, a 29-year-old video producer in New York, becomes motherless overnight. Two years later, she leaves America to rediscover joy and assess her career intentions by returning to her birth country to live with her father and travel. While there, she unconsciously mourns the loss of her father and her childhood city, Chengdu, which she left to immigrate to America at the age of eight. Meanwhile, her father is also mourning – the loss of growing up with his daughter and the woman he loves, Tiffany’s mother.
During her travels, she visits the autogenocide site in Cambodia and encounters two survivors, and follows her fear by snorkeling close to mantel rays in the Flores Sea. With less than three months left before her return to America, she stumbles upon Bhutan, a country with 71% of its land under forest cover but lacks ultrasound machines. This kingdom might be where she wants to live, but is she romanticizing it? She returns to decide as readers learn other sides of her deceased mother.
The memoir’s rhythmic pacing, outrageous humor, and uncomfortably comfortable honesty appeal to fans of Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died; its musical prose and emotion-provoking sentence forms are a treat for readers of Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, specifically Roman Stories.
I am currently unrepresented and am looking for a literary agent.
Email me at tiffanyyunedits at gmail dot com for the full manuscript or the first three chapters, etc.