Fine, I'm a Terrible Person

This funny mother-daughter caper story stars 73-year-old, overweight former beauty, Aurora, who is a perpetually broke, eccentric divorcee living in the wealthy enclave of Marin County. When Aurora discovers her father’s widow has died, she decides to drive to Los Angeles to see if this means money for her.

Enter Aurora’s high-strung and estranged daughter, 43-year-old Leyla, who spends her days keeping up with the other Marin uber-moms, manically pursuing perfection. When she overhears a conversation and suspects her husband is embarking on an affair, she decides to sneak into a Cannabis business conference he is attending, also in LA, to spy on him.

Aurora and Leyla’s separate quests simultaneously intersect and enmesh in Los Angeles over the course of a weekend provoking hijinks and chaos, and yes, even some healing.

About the Author
Lisa F. Rosenberg has a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in Art History, a M.A. in Graduate Humanities and a MFA in Creative Writing from Dominican University of California. Her early professional career was in the blue-chip retail art world as a Gallerist for several prominent San Francisco art dealers including Crown Point Press and John Berggruen Gallery.
She was most recently a public guide at SFMOMA and Museum Educator on staff at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
Her writing up until now has been in her professional life, primarily non-fiction, essays for exhibition catalogs, art criticism, tours, and public talks. Her short story, Family Footnotes, was recently featured in the summer 2024 edition of Amaranth: a journal of food writing, art and design, and she was a quarterfinalist in the Driftwood Press in house short story contest for the Spring of 2024.
Fine, I’m a Terrible Person is her debut novel. Her family heritage is Rhodeslis, Ladino speaking Sephardic Jews from the island of Rhodes. Her deep affection for her cultural legacy is reflected in the novel’s historical accuracy of language, cultural authenticity, and descriptions of mouthwatering cuisine.

Editorial Reviews

“What do you do with the toxic people in your life… In her funny and heartbreaking novel…Lisa Rosenberg pushes these questions to their boundaries… Rosenberg’s fast-paced novel travels from Rodeo Drive to a Cannabis Business convention to LA’s tight-knit Ladino-speaking Rhodeslis community, descendants of a Sephardic Jewish population from Rhodes that was decimated at the end of World War II. As Leyla strives to keep hold of her family, and her sanity, she struggles to answer a question many readers will understand: How do you know when it’s time to walk away from a toxic relationship?” —Susan Breen, award-winning author of The Fiction Class and the Maggie Dove mystery series

“A masterfully wrought exploration of grief, insomnia, and the unrelenting echoes of family dysfunction. With razor-sharp prose and a searing emotional core, the novel plunges us into the restless world of Leyla… What unfolds is a biting, laugh-out-loud examination of generational dysfunction, shifting cultural identities, and the absurdities of modern survival… Fans of Maria Semple, Meg Wolitzer, and Claire Messud will fall for what Rosenberg has captured, a picture of the maddening, tender, and deeply flawed bonds between mothers and daughters with an unflinching, hilarious eye.” —Lee Kravetz, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.