Anne Thomas Soffee is a belly dancer and special education teacher. She has been employed as a bookseller, gas station attendant, heavy metal band wrangler, freelance music journalist, tattoo parlor lackey, and voiceover actress for kung fu movies. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
After college, Anne Thomas Soffee journeyed to Los Angeles to start a career as a rock journalist and small-time heavy metal flack. This hilarious peek into the early years of the hair-band era reveals the hierarchy of fishnets, bustiers, and chicks with the Holy Grail—a backstage pass. A taste for other people’s prescriptions and too much beer edges her freelance journalism work right off her schedule. She struggles with not being thin enough, pretty enough, or cool enough when, in the midst of the L.A. riots, Soffee is offered a coveted slot in Virginia Commonwealth University's MFA writing program. Determined to pull herself out of current habits, Soffee starts turning her life around, making a stop at rehab before she heads off to graduate school. Her quarter-life crisis is packed with offbeat characters that prove that fact is often funnier than fiction.
This hilariously uplifting memoir follows an Arab–American woman’s merry life as she shimmies her way from getting dumped by her tattoo-artist boyfriend to coming to grips with being single, ample, and 30. In the tradition of Bridget Jones’s Diary but true, this uniquely American story is filled with colorful characters such as Rosie, the corn-rowed truck-driving belly dancer; Fahed, cologne-doused rich loser; Too-Tall Mary, a member of an amateur belly dancing troupe; and Gimmel, the author’s Jewish great-uncle. While searching online for a sexy sheik to save her from her lackluster existence, Soffee finds a belly dancing class in a catalog and, against the wishes of her Lebanese–American extended family, enrolls in an attempt to find her roots and heal her heart. Her life will never be the same as she discovers the riotous world of American belly dancing, a warm and welcoming subculture where younger and thinner are not necessarily better. Surprised to find happiness among the zils and trills of attending classes and performing in moose lodges and county fairs, she finds true love along the way.
