The Golden Handle
by
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“I want…I want to go somewhere, somewhere far, far away from here, away from department stores and cashmere, away from selfishness and career consumed corporate sellouts. I want to live somewhere without drive-through milkshakes, without hair stylists and pedicures, somewhere so far detached from the “American Dream” that everyone can laugh at what a joke it is without worrying they’ll be punished for challenging the norm. What we have, what everyone in this stupid city chases after is about as worthwhile as air, but no one here can see it, no one even stops to think for two seconds that there’s more to life than what we have now…because there is beauty in the world, real beauty, all around us, happening every single second, but no one stops to look at it because they’re on their way to a lunch meeting. Where I want to go, there won’t be any lunch meetings. I want to go somewhere where people actually appreciate things like the sound of birds chirping, the softness of a baby’s skin, the way the light can hit a street sign in a certain way that the glare actually illuminates the streets. I want to go somewhere…somewhere golden.”
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About the Book
Wendy’s life has been anything but typical. Her father raped her on her sixth birthday, and yet she still lives in the same apartment in Manhattan with him, although he’s become such an emotionless figure that she’s hardly forced to communicate with him anyway. In fact, she’s hardly as concerned with him as her mother, Stella. Dense, materialistic, and needy, Stella is more interested in living vicariously through her daughter than actually raising her. And Wendy knows it. After a particularly icy argument on her seventeenth birthday, Wendy bolts. She’s not coming back.
The Golden Handle follows Wendy along through a week of sheer hell as she tries to find a sense of genuine happiness that she’s lacked for eleven years, and Stella’s desperate attempt to reconnect with her only daughter. But after a week laden with racism, murder, an apartment fire, kidnapping, and prostitution, will Wendy really be able to say it was worth it? Will Stella find a way to cope with her own rotten childhood and give her daughter the love she deserves? Does she even deserve a second chance?
About the Author
Josh Berman grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where he currently maintains a part-time job at the local frozen yogurt shop while attending Chapman University, pursuing a double major in screenwriting and psychology. He has loved all forms of the written word since elementary school and dreams to one day publish work in as many different literary venues as possible. A cross between a hopeless romantic and a laid-back realist, Berman is particularly fascinated with unraveling the fragile enigma of what we call the "teenage mind."