Self-Discovery, Adventure, and Romance: A Woman's Journey From Youth to Middle Age,From Men to Women,
From Woodstock to the Fall of the Berlin Wall
"Energetic, fictive diary entries track one woman's 1960s and '70s in this engaging, well-constructed first novel. Curran's prose maneuvers ably between the requirements of narrative drive and the improvised feel of real journals; interpolated present-tense scenes gives Molly's story a satisfying conclusion."
--Publishers Weekly (March 1, 1999)
It's hot. It's 1969, and August in New York City. Molly Williams is young, conservative and inexperienced when she discovers her boyfriend necking with his male roommate in a Greenwich Village restaurant. She freaks out, hitches a ride to Woodstock, does drugs for the first time, and winds up in medical emergency in the arms of Johnson, a gentle, spiritual Asian-American.
Thus begins a roller-coaster ride that takes Molly through the thrills and fears of growth and complicated relationships. When things don't work out with Johnson, Molly becomes emotionally, physically, and artistically involved with her former sister-in-law, Nancy, in a relationship full of fire.
Molly survives twenty years of emotional adventure and emerges a fully realized woman and artist. Along the way she has lived in the real world, a world made up of the Vietnam War, Nixon, gay rights, Reagan and artistic trends that marked the passing decades between Woodstock and the end of the Cold War.
"Leigh Curran is a fine writer with an exotic mix of large-hearted bawdiness and refined sensibiliteis. I couldn't put Going Nowhere Sideways down." --Michael Weller, playwright
 About the Author
Leigh Curran has had a long and varied career as an actress and a writer. She has acted in films, television, and on and off Broadway. Her plays, The Lunch Girls, Alterations, and Walking the Blonde, have been published and produced. She has also written and produced a number of one-act plays, including Useful Trash, Zone 13 Hair, Michele Hammer, Detective, The Red Thing that Pumps, Connecting the Dots, Pressed Against Strangers, and Red Lipstick. Her poetry has been published in various magazines, including Onthebus, Spillway, and the poetry anthology The Third Eye Tour. She has had five poetry chapbooks published: Grapevine, Accidental Seedlings, Solitary Madness, All You Can Eat, and Buried Treasure. She has written television scripts for 20th Century Fox and MTM Entertainment, and for aired episodes of St. Elsewhere, Remission, The Paper Chase, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Curran now lives in Los Angeles, where she is artistic director of the Virginia Avenue Project, a project that puts at-risk youth together with professional writers, performers, and directors to create theater. Going Nowhere Sideways is Ms. Curran's first novel.
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