Excerpt from My Flawless Life by Yvonne Woon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The downstairs light was on when I got home. Predictably, my dad was still up watching the news, pretending not to be waiting for me.

"Can you believe this?" he said, gesturing at the screen. Ruby, our Cavalier, was asleep on the couch beside him.

I had no idea what he was talking about but humored him anyway. "I can't believe it."

The news always exasperated him. He still hadn't gotten used to being an onlooker. "You know, you don't have to stay up every time I go out."

"I wasn't, and of course I do," my dad said, before turning off the TV and following me into the kitchen. Though it was a joke, it also wasn't. He studied me. "So how was your night?"

I hated how worried he looked when I went out on my own. "Fine," I murmured, peering into the fridge. "How was date night?"

He glanced at the ceiling. My mom was in the room directly above us, reading in bed. "Fine."

Twice a month, my parents went out under the pretense of a date, but I knew that they were actually going to couples' therapy. This was how things happened in our house—in secret. Everything was about keeping up appearances, and they were good at it.

Take, for example, my father, Skip Lerner, former and longtime Democratic senator of Virginia, once loved by all, the darling of the media with his charmingly wholesome face and boyish flop of hair. If you'd slept through the last two years, you wouldn't guess that he'd been forced to resign after what I liked to call our Catastrophic Event, or what other people referred to simply as the crash, which sent our lives into a spiral; that behind his grin he was treading water, gasping for air, trying to grab hold of a rope that was drifting away.

And then there was my mom, the beautiful and elegant Francine Yang, former philanthropist who still carried herself as if she sat on the board of multiple charities, who spent weekend nights trying on her expensive clothes as though she had somewhere important to go, and who arranged and rearranged the décor in our town house so that it looked like we had money and influence so that she could distract herself from the fact that most of our belongings had been auctioned off.

"Where'd you go?" I ventured. It wasn't that I enjoyed making my dad lie; I just wanted to see how far he'd take it.

"Oh, just that little Italian place near the waterfront." He said it so casually that I almost believed it. He'd always been a good liar. "Was the catering bad?" he asked, watching me make a cheese plate from odds and ends I found in the fridge.

I shrugged. "You know. The food at those things always looks better than it is."

He murmured in agreement and stole an olive from my plate. I waited for him to say good night and retreat upstairs, but instead he settled into the chair next to me.

"You know, most kids your age eat frozen pizza at this hour," he said.

"Did you see the state of the fridge? There isn't much to choose from."

From the outside we looked wealthy, but we were deeply in debt. Desperate debt, the kind that paid for imported charcuterie and chardonnay instead of groceries and milk, for a town house that we could barely afford to furnish, and two aging luxury cars that we couldn't afford to service. The kind of debt you took on because you were chained to an image of yourself that you couldn't let go.

My father smiled and squeezed my shoulder. "If I'd known you were going to be hungry, I would have ordered something for you."

Though I knew they hadn't gone out to eat, he said it so convincingly that I almost believed him.

"Okay," I countered. "Next date night, I want carbonara."

"The veal is much better."

"You can't eat veal," I said in disbelief. "It's politically incorrect."

"I'm not a politician anymore. I don't have to be correct."

Excerpted from My Flawless Life by Yvonne Woon. Copyright © 2023 by Yvonne Woon. Excerpted by permission of Katherine Tegan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.