Author Event! Sonya Walger with Samantha Dockser

In Partnership with The Preoccupied! Your LA Literary Social Calendar & Home of Walking Book Club!

About the Book:

A woman who’s always been defined as a wife, mother, and rule follower makes the complicated choice to put her own happiness first in this stunning novel that's perfect for readers of Miranda July, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Sarah Manguso.
Annie and Hector have been hosting their friends Candace, Edouard, and their son, Remy, in the guest house of their Connecticut home for many months while their friends’ home undergoes renovations. As a thank-you, Candace gifts Annie French lessons with twenty-six-year-old local French tutor, Thierry. Hector, an actor, goes to film on location, leaving Annie—newly bereaving her mother—to single-parent their two kids.

As the lessons progress, she finds herself unexpectedly vulnerable to the charms of a man closer in age to her own teenage daughter than to her own. A new life for Annie emerges, one she could never have foreseen.
Told over the course of one year, through the shifting perspectives of wife, husband, lover, best friend and children, Walger paints a contradictory, nuanced portrait of a woman who walks away from every role that tradition and society have expected of her.

About the Speakers:

Sonya Walger is an award-winning actress, best known for her role as Penny Widmore on Lost and Molly Cobb in the first three seasons of Apple TV+’s For All Mankind. Other career highlights include the original Broadway production of Frost/Nixon, Parenthood, Tell Me You Love Me, Scandal, Flashforward, and In Treatment. She studied English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford and was the host of the literary podcast, Bookish. Her first book, Lion, a semiautobiographical novel was published by New York Review Books in February 2025. She lives in Malibu, California.

A woman who’s always been defined as a wife, mother, and rule follower makes the complicated choice to put her own happiness first in Wifehouse - perfect for readers of Miranda July, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Sarah Manguso.

Samantha Dockser is the co-head of Logue Social, an author exclusive social media marketing agency, and the co-founder of @ThePreoccupied and Preoccupied Walking Book Club, which was recently profiled in the LA Times as a gen-z and millennial book club reshaping the literary scene. She is a well established content creator herself with over 300k followers across channels. Samantha lives in Los Angeles with her fiancé and their toy poodle, Mr. Darcy.