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Carpaccio
When eating at this little Italian restaurant on Norton St, you can't go past its speciality e...
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Get happy
What's the secret to happiness? Experts and authors agree, it's all about attitude...
If you had to list the 10 best days of your life to date, could you do it? It sounds simple enough but it's actually a lot harder than you'd think. In fact, I still haven't finished my list and I've had days to work on it.
Of course, the obvious ones spring immediately to mind - like, say, my wedding day. But truthfully, that wasn't really one of my best days. Because I desperately wanted everything to run to plan and it was a big, scary commitment to make, it erred more on the side of stressful.
Another milestone - my 21st birthday - was also less positive than it could have been. It resulted in two of my cousins having a catfight while I was blowing out the candles on my cake, and me being dateless because I'd broken up with my dream guy a few weeks earlier.
Is it such a sad world we live in that we have to struggle to come up with such a list? Should finding 10 ripper days out of 10,585 days on earth (and, yes, you can work out the years yourself) be so hard?
read on below advertisement
The 10 Best Days of My Life ($32.99, Hachette, out July 3) is the title and premise of a new chick-lit novel by LA gal Adena Halpern, dubbed "the real-life Carrie Bradshaw". (She's also behind the memoir Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown: Notes from a Single Girl's Closet, and has written for US Marie Claire magazine and The New York Times.)
Her book revolves around a 27-year-old personal shopper, Alex, who lives in LA (funny that) and worries that what she is doing with her life is slightly pointless.
Or at least she does until she is killed by a Mini Cooper while walking her dog, Peaches, at four in the morning. When Alex gets to heaven she finds herself on the seventh plane - a place with no cellulite, walk-in closets, calorie-free ice cream sundaes and a straight, single, hunky next door neighbour. (Sounds dreamy.)
But just when Alex thinks things are going to be fine, she finds out she has to earn her right to stay in this heaven by writing a compelling essay on the 10 best days of her life.
Halpern says the book idea came to her one night when her husband asked her what she thought the 10 best days of her life were. "I had been trying to think of ideas for a new book and that's when it occurred to me: what if I told the story of someone's life after they died and incorporated those 10 most important days as part of the narrative?"
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If you had to list the 10 best days of your life to date, could you do it? It sounds simple enough but it's actually a lot harder than you'd think. In fact, I still haven't finished my list and I've had days to work on it.
Of course, the obvious ones spring immediately to mind - like, say, my wedding day. But truthfully, that wasn't really one of my best days. Because I desperately wanted everything to run to plan and it was a big, scary commitment to make, it erred more on the side of stressful.
Another milestone - my 21st birthday - was also less positive than it could have been. It resulted in two of my cousins having a catfight while I was blowing out the candles on my cake, and me being dateless because I'd broken up with my dream guy a few weeks earlier.
Is it such a sad world we live in that we have to struggle to come up with such a list? Should finding 10 ripper days out of 10,585 days on earth (and, yes, you can work out the years yourself) be so hard?
read on below advertisement
The 10 Best Days of My Life ($32.99, Hachette, out July 3) is the title and premise of a new chick-lit novel by LA gal Adena Halpern, dubbed "the real-life Carrie Bradshaw". (She's also behind the memoir Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown: Notes from a Single Girl's Closet, and has written for US Marie Claire magazine and The New York Times.)
Her book revolves around a 27-year-old personal shopper, Alex, who lives in LA (funny that) and worries that what she is doing with her life is slightly pointless.
Or at least she does until she is killed by a Mini Cooper while walking her dog, Peaches, at four in the morning. When Alex gets to heaven she finds herself on the seventh plane - a place with no cellulite, walk-in closets, calorie-free ice cream sundaes and a straight, single, hunky next door neighbour. (Sounds dreamy.)
But just when Alex thinks things are going to be fine, she finds out she has to earn her right to stay in this heaven by writing a compelling essay on the 10 best days of her life.
Halpern says the book idea came to her one night when her husband asked her what she thought the 10 best days of her life were. "I had been trying to think of ideas for a new book and that's when it occurred to me: what if I told the story of someone's life after they died and incorporated those 10 most important days as part of the narrative?"
next page »
