Book excerpt: Lucy Pescitelli is a virgin pushing thirty, working part-time at a funeral home and still living with her mother Marge. A woman so domineering that she forces Lucy to help her commit suicide by following step-by-step instructions as if they were a recipe for deviled eggs. Now, Lucy is on her own for the first time. The social mores of Jane Austen meet the city streets of Rocky Balboa as Lucy must negotiate a world of rigid expectations, entertain a cast of comical characters, and decide whom to marry or not in the still tradition-bound South Philadelphia of the early 1990s.