For Joan Liang, life is a series of surprising developments; she never thought she would leave Taiwan (and for all places, California), nor did she expect her first marriage to implode - especially as quickly and spectacularly as it did. She very definitely did not expect to fall in love with an older, wealthy American and become his third wife, mother to his youngest children. Through all this she asks herself the question we all ask at some point: is this it? Is this what all this living is for?
As Joan and her children grow older and her circumstances shift, Joan decides to make a drastic change: she opens the Satisfaction Cafe, a place where the lonely and unsatisfied can come for conversation and be heard and seen in all their messy honesty. In her pragmatic way, Joan builds a business and a legacy out of connection- something she can call her life's work.
THE SATISFACTION CAFE is a novel about found family, the joy and loneliness that come with age, and the outsized gravity a single existence can have in many lives. THE SATISFACTION CAFE is also a deep pleasure to read; it has a timelessness to that slakes a thirst.