A wickedly smart, utterly hilarious debut from a Southern Living columnist–mother of three, Southerner married to a New Yorker, evangelical Christian, and Democrat–about the absurdity, chaos, and strange sacredness of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The thing about being an evangelical Christian and a Southerner living in New York City, raising her children in an apartment where one of them sleeps in a closet, is that there are a lot of people in your life to disappoint.

So says Elizabeth Passarella in her wry and witty debut, Good Apple. Among the people she has to disappoint are her mother in Memphis, who still hopes her daughter will abandon her love of New York; her mother’s friends, horrified that a family of five lives in a two-bedroom apartment; her father, bewildered by how his daughter went from working for Ralph Reed to voting for Hillary Clinton; and, perhaps most of all, her colleagues and neighbors on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, who can’t believe it’s possible Elizabeth is both a successful New York professional and an evangelical Christian.

Whether describing the absurdities of dating in New York as a Christian, having a screaming fight with her (much loved) husband on a New York street corner, finding a rat trapped in her bedroom, or explaining how she is both a committed evangelical and a committed Democrat, Elizabeth’s sharp, funny, and slyly profound memoir is like sitting across the table from the sardonic yet wise best friend you always wished you had.