Product Description

Headley, a wise-cracking New York City girl with as much wit as any character on "Sex and the City", is jaded and cynical about men in New York. She vows to say yes to any and every person who asks her out - a taxi driver, a homeless man - you name it, she'll say yes for an entire year. By the year's end, she meets the man she eventually marries. "The Year of Yes" is the hilarious and hopeful true account of one woman's quest to find a man she can stand (for longer than a couple of hours). Frustrated by her own pitiful taste, writer Maria Headley decided to leave her love life up to fate, going out with everyone who asked her: homeless men, taxi drivers, and yes, even a couple of women. Opening her heart and mind to the possibility that her perfect match might be the person she least expects, she spent 12 months dating most of New York City, and beyond, including: Jarzhe: a Microsoft millionaire who still lived with his mother; the rockstar: a young homeless man who believed himself to be Jimi Hendrix; IRA: her high school nemesis, whom she'd spent seven years rejecting; the mime: a man in the Marceau Mold who proposed with hand gestures; Chupa Chupa: a 70-year-old neighborhood eccentric who spoke only Spanish; and finally, a man whose baggage should have taken him off her list - at least until 'The Year of Yes' taught her what was really important: love and perseverance always wins in the end.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #346966 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'Maria has style, great wit and a hero's courage; it's almost impossible to believe it's a true story!' Kathleen Tessaro, author of 'Elegance' 'Funny, weepy and, ultimately, head-over-heels happy.' You magazine, Mail on Sunday 'Touching.' Heat magazine

About the Author
Maria Headley has been published in 'Susie Bright's Best American Erotica 2005', and 'The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Volume 5', as well as in several literary journals. Her plays have been developed at venues including The Kennedy Center and The Sundance Playlab. She lives in Seattle with her husband, playwright and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan, and her two stepkids.

Excerpted from The Year of Yes: The Story of a Girl, a Few Hundred Dates, and Fate by Maria Headley. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MY ROOMMATE VIC AND I WERE LIVING IN A SUBLET, AND SUFFERING. I’d come across an advertisement for a hipster building called The Barn. The Barn had once been a home for horses. Apartment hunting was a depressing thing. My visit to The Barn was really more of a dreamer’s quest. I made an appointment with a guy who had a cute-sounding baritone, and walked to South Williamsburg to tour the buildingâ€"gorgeous, despite a faint odor of hay and manure.
The Entrepreneur was Italian, with a mop of black hair, blue eyes, and a springy walk.
'I can’t afford this,' I told him sadly.
'Look anyway,' he said. 'Look at the view!'
He led me to the window, and pointed out across Brooklyn. The view wasn’t actually that good. That hadn’t been The Entrepreneur’s point. He kissed my neck.
'Have dinner with me,'he said.
When I got home, I trilled to Vic, 'I have a real date! With someone who will pay! With a guy who isn’t homeless, who isn’t French, who isn’t our handyman! Someone I can introduce to my mom!'
But Vic didn’t answer. She was having issues with a guy leftover from our freshman year at NYU. She’d run into him on the street, and he’d introduce her to his girlfriends, as his 'good friend.' Later, he’d get her to meet him somewhere dark, where he’d kiss her hair and tell her how much he really, really loved her. When the lights came up, he’d peck her on the cheek and fail to call for another three weeks.
'I hate skinny white boys,' Vic said. 'Why do I love skinny white boys?'
I had no idea. They were my accepted dating demographic, Idahoan that I was, but I never dated them. I didn’t notice them, dazzled as I was by the ethnic diversity of New York City. Vic, on the other hand, was Chinese, and according to her family, she was supposed to be dating nice Chinese boys. Preferably the kind who were at least partway through an M.B.A. Vic was rebellious. She’d never gotten within fifty yards of any parentally-acceptable boy. Neither had I. Until now.
'I give up. I’m going Chinese,' said Vic, picking up the phone.
'Fried rice?' I asked, assuming she was ordering for delivery.
'Boy,' she said. 'My friend told me about one who’s almost cute.'
'If he wants a traditional feminine Chinese girl, he’s shit out of luck,' Vic said a little later, as she got dressed, stomping a combat boot and killing a cockroach. She was wearing all black.
I, in a more optimistic mood, was wearing a 1950’s pink sundress. I twirled my crinoline.
'My family would be happier if they had you instead,' said Vic. 'You and my mom could wear girly dresses together.'
'None of my boys are M.B.A. candidates, though,' I pointed out. Most often, they were performing artists, and living on unemployment checks. That, or varying degrees of mentally ill.
'One was Japanese, one was Chinese, one was Korean,' said Vic. 'You’re in the lead as far as my mom is concerned.'
'Tonight’s Italian,' I said. 'But he makes a lot of money.
'My mom might make an exception for that,' Vic said. 'Pass him to me, if you don’t like him.'
THE ENTREPRENEUR FED ME SPAGHETTI AND TIRAMISU. Then he took me to his apartment, dimmed the lights, and put a Billie Holliday record on an antique phonograph. He even tried to dance with me (not possible, considering my seventeen left feet). It was impossibly romantic. Maybe I should have been dating mom-appropriate men all along. He succeeded in getting most of my dress off, before things fell apart.
The temperature dropped. Literally. The Entrepreneur had turned on an industrial strength air conditioner he’d scavenged from a job site. He returned to the room, fully dressed in a blue tracksuit, and carrying another one over his arm. He’d been half-naked when he left. O-kay. A little weird, but he was a good kisser, so I forgave him for another half hour, until we were in his bed, and my blood was turning to frozen slushy. My teeth chattering, I asked him if he had protection.

'I already have it on,' he said, in a seductive voice. 'Under my sweatpants.'

The only explanation for the following extremely embarrassing error, is that my body was in self-preservation mode. 'Heat,' said my body. 'I don’t care how bad it is! We have frostbite!'

Reader, I slept with him.

At least, I think I did. He was tiny. Baby carrot tiny. This explained the dimmed lights and off-site condom donning, though not the AC. The fact that, post-god awful-coitus, he looked at me tenderly, and asked if I 'needed to be held for a minute,' is harder to explain. The fact that he then turned on a PBS documentary on raw sewage, and asked me to put on the extra sweatsuit if I wanted to stay in his bed, is still harder to make sense of.
Suffice it to say that I emitted a single scream of distress, dressed and escaped the premises, cursing my need to please my mom by dating a moneyed man. When I got home, I quietly climbed the ladder to my loft bed.

'How was it?' asked Vic, out of the dark below me.

'Horrifying,' I said, and proceeded to give her a blow-by-blow. Or rather, no-blow, by no-blow. 'How was your boy? As bad as you thought?'

Vic was silent for a moment.

'Maria? Meet Phil,' she said.

'Hi,' said a disembodied male voice from Vic’s bed.

'Hello Phil,' I said, and hid my red face in my pillow.
I never did meet Phil. He fled before I woke up, and Vic went back to skinny white boys. I went back to impoverished men of all colors. Just because a guy had one quality that was parentally acceptable, didn’t mean he had anything more than that.

Customer Reviews

A WAY TO OPEN YOUR MIND & HEART, AND LAUGH TOO
The Year of Yes is very funny, yes, and quite sexy, yes, but mainly, it's a hell of an interesting story. What would happen if you decided, for one year, to say yes to everyone who asked you out? Would your life change? This woman's did - from the inside out, and by the end of the year, she was a different person than the one who began it. In that sense, it's a coming of age story. I laughed throughout this book, but I also cried, and not only that, I thought about how my life might be different if I decided to take a chance once in awhile - not just romantically, but in terms of my friends, my work, everything. The writing is smart, and my husband caught me laughing out loud in my sleep after I'd been reading before bed. Recommended to everyone who's ever been single, who's ever been sad, and basically, to everyone who has any sense of humor at all.

Smart, NY, Seeks Heart - in any guise
At the age of 20, Maria Headley heads for the Big Apple from Idaho, the potato state where she was born and bored. Armed with a diminutive frame bearing “a fine rack”, a big head conntaining an entire library, and an even bigger smile, she is determined to be a writer. A year later, she knows she’s smart, but she wants heart too. Deciding her criteria for a dream man must be too limited, she embarks on a year of saying 'Yes' to any man who wanted to date her.

There follows a chronicle of unfettered adventures with a most improbable cast who are variously hilarious, poignant, heartbreaking and just plain weird – a tribute to NY’s enormously diverse population. There is a happy ending, with a person unthinkable at the outset

"The Year of Yes" appeals on three levels. The first is to live vicariously a life thrown open to the unexpected by saying ‘Yes’ where previously Maria would have said ‘No’. It cannot fail to inspire readers to do something similar in whatever areas of their lives are both unsatisfactory and bounded by ‘No’s. Given Maria’s turbocharged two-hours-a-night-sleep lifestyle, uninhibited approach to sex and passionate intensity, her company is not dull

The second is in the –wait for it - moral: if you look for love hard enough it will find you. That even in todays’ amoral, immoral, post-moral world, it is still possible to find a happy ending. What’s cute is that Maria’s year of yes takes her through a maze of experiences which the traditionally-minded will regard as outrageously immoral.

If Maria’s New York life is turbo, so is the writing, and both are self-consciously smart to the point you feel you are being written at. Is this a product of the ‘if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it’ school of writing? Put cynically, ingenuous female Holden Caulfield, 21, reads "The Dice Game", and uses assets (boobs, smile, sex drive, open-ended curiosity) to trawl NY for the L experience, picking up book material along the way. After all, no sex, no book.

Leave cynicism to one side, and the narrative itself cracks the shell of both life and written style. Together they become less in your face, more vulnerable – and more attractive - until finally, at her most vulnerable, the magic happens. It is this transition, both on and off the page, that gives the book its special appeal.

pretentious and disapointing
I really wanted to like this book it seemed a lovely idea for a book .
however
the annoying pretentious the book is littered with tons of literary name dropping that serve no purpose other then to telegraph the authors learning .The smart arse undergraduate style was a major turn off .

avoid !!