Everything is difficult before it becomes easy: Daniela Dröscher tells the story of a woman who finally takes responsibility for her own happiness with both intensity and humor. All her life, Ela has literally lived in her mother's shadow. Her mother's overweight body, according to her father, was responsible for the entire family's unhappiness. Now Ela is an adult, and it is her own, ailing body that drives her to despair. Shortly before completing her doctorate, Ela suffers a breakdown. While she unconsciously grapples with the question of whether she truly deserves her place in academia, her body rebels: her throat, her heart, her skin—Ela is on fire and spirals into increasing panic. Just like the story of her mother, to whom Daniela Dröscher dedicated her bestselling novel "Lies About My Mother," Ela's late-blooming self-discovery and self-empowerment is masterfully constructed in autofictional terms, psychologically gripping, and delightfully funny. biography Daniela Dröscher, born in Munich in 1977, studied German, English, and Philosophy in Trier and London and received her doctorate from the University of Potsdam for her work on the poetics of Yoko Tawada. She writes prose, plays, and essays, and in 2005 received the Essay Prize of the Young Academy Berlin as well as the Schiller Essay Prize of the City of Weimar. In 2008, she participated as a scholarship recipient in the writers' workshop of the Literary Colloquium Berlin. New product