Hating every minute of it, a NYC artist must travel back to her small New England hometown to stop her cousin’s disastrous wedding, reconcile with her father or lose her family forever.

SYNOPSIS:

RELATIVE TERMS is a dramady/romance about COLLEEN MORRISEY, an angry twenty-something performance artist living in NYC. Colleen was always very “artistic” when she was growing up, which translated to “alienated strangely-dressed outcast loser with underarm hair” in high school speak. Her father didn’t understand her, and when her mother died, Colleen packed her bags and moved to New York. She hadn’t had contact with her family in years until one day she received an invitation to a cousin’s wedding in the mail. She wasn’t even remotely interested in going until she read the accompanying letter and discovered that her father was giving away her family home to the cousin as a wedding present.

Of course she has no desire to move back to Massachusetts and live in a hundred year old house with twenty rooms and only one toilet. She was determined to check it out and see if there was something else behind her father’s uncharacteristic generosity. Deep down inside, she’s still insecure enough not to want to go without some backup, so she drags along her roommate, a black woman who makes sculptures out of junk she finds in the street. Can you imagine? An angry feminist artist and her dreadlocked roomie descend upon the small New England town of Turners Falls like the 7th infantry going up Pork Chop Hill- a disaster on both sides waiting to happen.

Colleen mixes it up right away with her father. She finds out he wants to marry his dead wife’s sister and move into her house, so he won’t have any memories of his first wife haunting his dreams. Colleen also gets in to it with her flaky younger cousin, Briana, who happens to be pregnant and unsure if her fiance is the father of the baby. Colleen manages to get her cousin to call off the wedding, she reconciles with her father and she falls surprisingly in love with her high school art instructor, in spite of the fact that she’s a very angry girl and he’s a strict vegetarian. That makes no sense, but love never does. By the end of the story, her father has settled happily with his love, her cousin has come to terms with being a single mother and the art instructor has chased a train on a bicycle to proclaim his devotion to Colleen. That’s a happy ending in my book.