If you've ever been dumped, duped, or three minutes from crazy, you'll love Crazy Aunt Purl. Side-splittingly funny and profoundly moving, Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair is the true-life misadventures of Laurie Perry, aka Crazy Aunt Purl, a slightly neurotic, displaced Southerner trying to create a new life after her husband leaves her to "get his creativity back." (Whatever the hell that means.) But will she get her groove back in a tiny rented apartment, with a mountain of boxes, visible panty lines, and a slight wine-and-Cheetos problem?

"I was a thirty-something woman living alone with four cats. I was probably going to be divorced. I was on the short bus to crazy. I pictured my grandmother making hoop-skirted yarn cozies for the toilet paper. I pictured myself making doilies for furniture that I did not own. I saw my cats wearing knitted hats with lace appliques. From my vantage point, knitting seemed like 100 percent of some road I did not want to walk down."

Yet, surprisingly, it's knitting that saves her and emboldens her to become fully engaged in life again — to discover new friends; to take risks, however scary; and to navigate the ins and outs of the modern dating scene.

"Dating has changed in a decade. Now there is a higher chance of meeting someone who has an internet porn addiction than someone who has a job. In Los Angeles, your dinner companion might have served time in Pelican Bay or run a meth lab. Or, worst of all, he might spend all night talking about his agent, his craft, and what it means to grow as an actor. Then he'll ask you to read his screenplay."

And such is life in this quirky, irreverent memoir, a spin-off of the blog phenomenon, www.crazyauntpurl.com, one of the most successful online diaries in history, exploding to an international fan base of enthusiastic readers. But don't worry, you don't have to knit to love Aunt Purl. You just have to know what it feels like to have loved, to have lost, or to have taken a leap of faith.

We've all been there: Pass the wine.

"Watch out, Bridget Jones: There's a new singleton in town, and she's got needles! This hilarious book chronicles the life of a newly divorced woman, as she struggles, dates, and knits her way back to sanity." Knit.1 magazine

"Poignant, funny and something every woman will relate to, whether or not she's been divorced, whether or not she knits, whether or not she finds herself covered in cat hair 'from the knees down.' My only criticism — I didn't want it to end!" Annie Modesitt, author of Twist And Loop and Romantic Hand Knits

Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair is the irreverent first-person narrative of Crazy Aunt Purl facing life as a contemporary cat-loving, divorced, knitting-obsessed female. Readers will laugh and cry with her as she gets dumped (cast off, in knitting terms), gains weight (casts on), and finds new friends, and her true self, as she learns to knit.

For beginning to off-beat knitters, each group of vignettes showcases an original knitting recipe, from the quirky to the practical:
· A leopard-spotted Kleenex box cover (for a just-dumped crying jag)
· A wide-brimmed roll-down hat (for bad hair days)
· The every-new-knitter-knits-a-scarf scarf
· The Coworker scarf
· Felted drink coasters
· Flower pom-pom (if men don't bring you flowers, knit your own)
· Easy wine bag
· The Knitted Cat Thingmajig (or, the " Caterpiller" ) stripey knitted cat tunnel
· Felted overnight bag (for when you're ready to date again)

Laurie Perry has written for the Los Angeles Daily News. She has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Vogue Knitting. Visit her website at www.crazyauntpurl.com.