Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship Book

I didn’ t know that people come into our lives, and sometimes, if we’ re terribly lucky, we get the chance to love them, that sometimes they stay, that sometimes you can, truly, depend on them.

Cathie Beck was in her late thirties and finally able to exhale after a lifetime of just trying to get by. A teenage mother harboring vivid memories of her own hardscrabble childhood, Cathie had spent years doing whatever it took to give her children the stability— or at least the illusion of it— that she’ d never had. More than that, through sheer will and determination, she had educated them and herself too. With her kids in college, Cathie was at last ready to have some fun. The only problem was that she had no idea how to do it and no friends to do it with. So she put an ad in the paper for a made-up women's group: WOW . . . Women on the Way. Eight women showed up that first night, and out of that group a friendship formed, one of those meteoric, passionate, stand-by-you friendships that come around once in a lifetime and change you forever . . . if you’ re lucky.

Publishers Weekly

A newly-dumped empty nester at only 39, Beck could do whatever she wanted, but had no friends with whom to do it. She needed pals, so she placed an ad in a Colorado newspaper to form a "smart, sassy women's group," with no idea what sort of response she'd get. A bevy of women responded, and Beck winnowed the lot of potential partners in crime to a half-dozen. One of them would change her live forever, and their friendship is the subject of Beck's mood-hopping memoir. They seemed to have little in common at first glance; Denise Katz was sophisticated, glamorous, successful, while Beck saw herself as a "stubby Catholic girl with thin hair." But the two struck up a fast friendship rife with adventure, even as Katz slowly succumbed to the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis. It's easy to see why Cabernet attracted a major publisher after it was self-published to great acclaim on Amazon. Though often full of treacle, Beck doesn't shy away from a frank, honest portrayal. Readers may not always like the book's versions of Beck and Katz, but they will identify with them.
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