"If someone asked me a year ago why I thought it was that men leave women and never come back, I would have said this: New Cow. New Cow is short for New Cow Theory, which is short for Old Cow-New Cow Theory, which, of course, is short for the sad sorry truth that men leave woman and never come back because all they really want is New Cow. But no one asked me then. If someone asked me now I would have a different answer. I would roll my eyes, look toward the ceiling, raise both hands and shake them toward the heavens the way old Italian women do, and say this: They will never make sense; you will never understand them."

Welcome to the case file labeled "love" of one Jane Goodall — no, not the Jane Goodall, but a late-night TV producer who turns to the annals of animal behavior for an explanation when true love goes suddenly, inexplicably wrong. It began as a simple Cow meets Bull story: he was the young producer with the washboard stomach and the J-Crew good-looks, she the co-worker with her heart on the shelf. They met for drinks, fell in love, looked together for a cozy one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, and then suddenly, in only the third month of their post-copulatory phase, Ray Brown was gone. Not gone gone, but lost to that jungle of unreturned phone calls known as unrequited love. So Jane Goodall, with the help of Freud, Darwin, and her own menagerie of lovelorn friends — a broken-hearted womanizer named Eddie, her best friend Joan, who for the past two years has been dating her boss, a man engaged to another woman, and David, who shares with Jane both a taste for good-looking men and a terminal case of bad luck — delves into the mystery of the male animal.

"Girl meets boy, boy dumps girl...Zigman siphons off the tears and the curses and by alchemy converts them into laughter." People

"Clever, engaging...continually amusing." The Washington Post

"Wit, wisdom, and a sure comic voice...this is great fun,a dog-eared hoot." The Philadelphia Inquirer

New cow...

Ray makes the move. Jane feels the rush. Ray says the L-word. Jane breaks her lease. Then suddenly, inexplicably, he dumps her. Just. Like. That.

...old cow.

Now black is the only color in Jane's closet and Kleenex is clinging to her nose. Why did it happen? How could it have happened?

Moo.

Jane is going to get an answer. Not from Ray. Not from her best friends, David and Joan. But from an astounding new discovery of her own: The Old-Cow-New-Cow theory.

Forced to move into the apartment of a womanizing alpha male named Eddie, Jane is seeing the world of men and women in a brilliant new light. And when she takes her Old-Cow-New-Cow theory public, it will change her career and her whole life. Unless, of course, she's got it all wrong....

A hilariously funny and wonderfully wise debut. In her spare time, late-night TV producer Jane Goodall--not "the" Jane Goodall--studies animal behavior to try to understand how and why the man she loves has so suddenly, inexplicably jilted her.

Laura Zigman is the author of Animal Husbandry, Dating Big Bird, and Her. She spent ten years working in book publishing in New York. Her pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. She lives outside of Boston.