How is a woman in her thirties, HIV-positive and fresh out of rehab, supposed to find love and work in contemporary, urban America, steering clear of self-pity and doctrinaire “happy-talk”? This linked short story collection shows how Glory goes and gets some.

Emily Carter’s impressive debut traces one woman’s journey from town houses on Park Avenue and apartments on the Lower East Side, to Minnesota’s recovery community of boarding-houses in blighted urban neighborhoods and well-funded treatment centers in bucolic pastures.

Glory Goes and Gets Some is a streetwise and sardonic look at sex, HIV, addiction, and recovery. From her patrician childhood on the Upper East Side, to her chemical addictions downtown, to her unlikely, tenuous, yet rewarding alliances with the full range of treatment mavens in the Midwest, Glory gives us an uncensored and irreverent account of her experiences in twelve-step recovery—a process that, for all its faults, ultimately works for her. “That first six months, there were an awful lot of people I met who talked the talk, all the time. Their faces seemed to glow, and they’d go on about so-and-so ‘getting it,’ ‘getting’ the program, having that much-touted aura of serenity about them. It was my experience that such persons usually relapsed and stole their roommate’s stereo equipment, or charged five thousand dollars worth of lingerie at Neiman Marcus.”