Life is an often-confusing mixture of heartache and hilarity, or so prove Seth Greenland’s appealing characters in this tenderly comedic story of modern love. Imbued with Greenland’s signature wit, I Regret Everything confronts the oceanic uncertainty of what it means to be young and alive.
Jeremy Best, a Manhattan-based trusts and estates lawyer, has a second life as the poet Jinx Bell. To his boss’s daughter, Spaulding, Jeremy, at 33, is at first, already halfway to dead. When Spaulding, an aspiring 19-year-old writer, discovers Mr. Best’s alter writerly ego, the two become bound by a devotion to poetry. Their budding relationship offers them the possibility of enduring love, or the threat of tragic loss.
A skilled wordsmith with a talent for telling humor, Greenland creates fully realized characters, people that come to understand themselves as complex renderings of the human condition—at its often best, and sometimes worst. I Regret Everything explores happiness and heartache with a healthy dose of skepticism, and an understanding that the reality of love encompasses life, death, iambic pentameter, regret, trusts and estates.
Seth Greenland
Seth Greenland is the author of five novels. The last two, The Angry Buddhist (2011) and I Regret Everything (2015), were published by Europa Editions. Greenland is also a playwright and screenwriter and has worked as writer and producer for HBO. Born in New York City, he currently lives and works in Los Angeles with his wife.