Fugitive Blue by Dani Shapiro

Joanna Hirsch is an actress who has enjoyed recent success in an off-Broadway production. She is still haunted, however, by her artist mother leaving when she was twelve. This was also the age that she met the other significant person in her life, Billy Overmeyer. Fugitive Blue pieces together a picture of Joanna’s life, alternating between flashbacks of her from age twelve to the present, along with her struggles with abandonment issues and the fact that she and Billy were only ever friends. This is the third Dani Shapiro novel that I’ve blogged about. The other two, Family History and Black and White were much more interesting and complex and show a writer who’s really come into her own. Fugitive Blue was published in 1993.