Non­fic­tion

Loose Diamonds…and Oth­er Things I’ve Lost (and Found) Along the Way

Amy Ephron
  • From the Publisher
April 20, 2012
The dif­fer­ent stages of a woman’s life are revealed through writ­ing about food, friend­ship, domes­tic­i­ty, divorce, child rear­ing, jeal­ousy, and love— all pep­pered with Amy Ephron’s char­ac­ter­is­tic charm and humor.

Four years ago, Amy Ephron came home to find that every sin­gle piece of jew­el­ry she owned was gone- tak­en by a bur­glar that was respon­si­ble for an epi­dem­ic of mil­lions of dol­lars of stolen jew­el­ry across Los Ange­les. Miss­ing from Amy’s jew­el­ry box­es were the gold stud ear­rings that her moth­er had giv­en her when she’d first had her ears pierced, the twen­ties mar­c­a­site-and-crys­tal bracelet, and the pearls she nev­er wore from an ex-fiancé. While Amy was bereaved after real­iz­ing that her jew­el­ry would nev­er be replaced, she came to real­ize that its real val­ue lay in the mem­o­ries asso­ci­at­ed with the jew­el­ry, and not in the jew­el­ry itself.

These mem­o­ries spurned more mem­o­ries, and soon Amy began to write. What she formed was a series of essays titled , Loose Dia­monds, that cov­er the odd, fun­ny, dis­tress­ing (and every­thing-in-between) events in her life. From a child­hood sto­ry set in the 60s about The Bird Man”– a famous archi­tect who taught Amy about mag­ic – to nights in the 80s drink­ing Cristal, to the time when a 10,000-lb trac­tor fell in her back­yard to the strug­gles of post-mod­ern dat­ing, to her life­long love affair with Saks Fifth Avenue, this book will touch on love, loss and the tan­gi­ble val­ue of mem­o­ries; mar­riage, divorce, infi­deli­ty, and the abil­i­ty to say next!” The essays are linked in tone by a relent­less opti­mism, humor, and a mea­sured under­stand­ing that ups and downs, Gidlove and heart­break, friend­ship and loss are the fab­ric of a woman’s life.

Discussion Questions