This book begins where most love sto­ries leave off: at the begin­ning of real life. 

I Want­ed to Be Won­der­ful fol­lows the lives of two women in their first years of moth­er­hood. One is a fic­tion­al char­ac­ter try­ing to live the hap­pi­ly-ever-after life we all imag­ined for our­selves. The sec­ond woman is the author her­self, relat­ing her real life sto­ry. It’s a sto­ry of meta­mor­pho­sis, from inde­pen­dent work­ing woman to moth­er, help­less in the face of the dis­cov­ery that there’s some­thing wrong with her small daugh­ter — some­thing very seri­ous­ly wrong.

In tren­chant, thought­ful, and often laugh-out-loud fun­ny prose, Lihi Lapid tells a true-life sto­ry of women and — men — strug­gling to live up to mod­ern pres­sures: a sto­ry about shat­tered dreams, and about find­ing the strength to gath­er up the pieces and to learn to smile again.