About the Book (About the Author, Below)

I don’t know about you – but I’m ready to parTAY with a teensy little glass o’ cabernet (or whatever floats your particular boat).

It’s been one heck of a road, but this memoir, first drafted in 1999, sold to Hyperion Books at a three-house auction in November 2009 and hits book shelves July 20, 2010.

Memoirs have their own life, their own schedule. Cheap Cabernet was first drafted – all initial 90 pages of it — during the Columbine high school shootings in 1999. As moribund as that sounds, the event proved a catalyst for breaking wide open my own broken heart.

I’d lost the dearest friend I’d ever known the previous year – the one I’d had more fun with, more fights with and way more adventures with – than anyone who’d come before her. One year after her death, I was just letting go of the tell-tale signs of grief: the inability to concentrate, the compulsion to talk of her to people who’d never met her, the chronic, stunning re-realizations that I’d never see her again.

Yet, that’s not what this friendship was about. It wasn’t about sadness, but rather the joie de vivre of life, the renewed knowledge that no matter what circumstances you face, there’s always the side-splitting joke, the wickedly wild adventure, the glass of (often) very cheap cabernet.

That first draft of Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship went through years of rejections, years of stagnation and – dare I say it? – years of not-getting-published frustration and a wee bit o’ bitterness, ladies and germs.

Then – Voila! – after self-publishing Cheap Cabernet in the Fall of 2009, a completely unexpected, very exciting groundswell of online and reader support seemed to come from some cosmic place. Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship, in an extraordinary trajectory, reached Amazon.com’s “No. 1 Movers & Shakers” spot. Amazon! Can you imagine? A little self-published book – No. 1 on Amazon?!

Thank you, Denise, wherever you’re at. You and I both know you’ve been working your savvy mojo on Cheap Cabernet for a long, long time from whatever 400-count percale ensconced cloud you’re resting on.

Here’s a very full glass to you!

About the Author

Cathie Beck is a Denver-based, award-winning journalist and creative writer. Her short stories have been published in Riverrun Literary Magazine, Glimmer Train Literary Collective, Red Dirt Publications, and Zoetrope Stories, to name a few, and in innumerable university literary periodicals and publications.

She has written for the Boulder Daily Camera, the Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, The Rocky Mountain News, The Denver Business Journal, Poets & Writers Magazine, and Writers Digest. She presently contributes to a number of regional and national publications and is “The Wine Wench” columnist for ColoradoBiz Magazine (www.cobizmag.com) and KUVO radio (www.kuvo.org) in Denver, Colorado.

She is the recipient of the Louisiana Press Women’s and Denver Press Woman’s Writing Awards, the Scripps-Howard Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the University of Colorado’s Dean’s Award for Writing.

She has taught at various universities and holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In 1968, she twirled the baton in the Indianapolis 500 Parade, after taking a coveted 4th place trophy in a baton twirling championship.

She harbors (in no particular order) crushes on Mickey Rourke, Jeff Bridges and Jamie Foxx.