Waiting

Many people can tell horror stories about their teenage or college stints waiting tables. For Debra Ginsberg, struggling writer and single mother, waitressing has been a means of survival -- and she has the scars to prove it.

In Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress -- part memoir, part social commentary, part guide on how to behave when dining out-Ginsberg takes readers on an intimate journey of her twenty years as a waitress at the dingiest of diners, a soap-operatic Italian restaurant, an exclusive five-star dining club, and more. While chronicling her parallel evolution as a writer and single mother, the book also takes a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant life -- revealing that, yes, when pushed, a server will spit in food, and, no, that's not really decaf you're getting-and at how most people in this business are in a constant state of waiting to do something else.

Colorful, insightful, and often irreverent, Ginsberg's stories truly capture the spirit of the universal things she's learned about human nature, interpersonal relationships, the frightening things that go on in the kitchen, romantic hopes dashed and rebuilt, and all of the frustrating and funny moments in this life. Waiting is for everyone who has had to wait for their life to begin -- only to realize, suddenly, that they're living it.