On paper, Arabella Hicks is more than qualified to teach a weekly fiction class on New York's Upper West Side: She's an author hersetf; she's passionate about books; she's even named after the heroine in a Georgette Heyer novel.

So why do her students seem so difficult? And why can't she find an ending to the novel she has been working on for seven years? Arabella's beginning to suspect that it's because her mother, Vera Hicks, is driving her insane.After each class, she goes to see Vera n a nursing home outside the city.Every visit turns into an argument. Arabella can't figure out how to make peace, until one day she discovers something surprising: Her mother wants to be a writer.

Slowly, cautiously, Arabella begins to teach her, and as the lessons progress along with her class, Arabella discovers that it is she who has a tot to learn about writing, and about love.

The collision of truth and fiction can result in romance or even redemption—or so say the writing exercises and life lessons that make up Breen's debut novel. For years, Arabella Hicks's love life, like her writing life, has felt flat and fruitless. Still, the 38-year-old copy editor and part-time teacher can summon neither the drive to date nor the wherewithal to finish her novel, Courting Disaster, now seven years in the rewriting. She's anxious about her mother, Vera, whom she visits in a nursing home every Wednesday after teaching her writing class. Worried about Vera's Parkinson's disease—and still grieving her father's death—Arabella discovers her personal fears seeping into classroom discussions of plot, point of view and dialogue. One student, the well-spoken, well-to-do Chuck, begins a relationship with Arabella and thus installs himself into the mother-daughter drama. Breen, a writing instructor, sometimes overplays her hand, but she does inject a dose of originality into an otherwise familiar setup.