Love and Other Incurable Ailments

Serenity Tomczyk, the first-person narrator of Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is obsessive to the point of hypochondria, annoying yet shy, well-meaning, funny, sometimes unlikable, and one of the most original characters I’ve ever run into in a novel. As she tries to “organize” her neighbor’s messy kitchen and frets that her stomach pain might be the severe bacterial infection listeriosis, I want to yell at her to shut up and relax. In other words, she’s a real, three-dimensional human being.

The stakes spike higher as Serenity bumbles her way into some serious risks.

Ever since her mother died during Covid and her fiancé broke off their engagement, Serenity has been sleepwalking through her daily routine in suburban Michigan. She works in her aunt’s home decor shop and takes care of her cat (named Margaret Thatcher), with her social life revolving mainly around her support group for people with anxiety issues.

Then she sees a red-haired woman heave a box into the dumpster behind her aunt’s store.

Self-righteously indignant that the woman has illegally discarded her personal garbage—and imagining that the box might contain an amputated toe, the skeleton of a dead pet, or an unwanted baby—Serenity pulls on disposable gloves (to avoid germs, of course) and retrieves the box. In fact, it holds a series of passionate love letters from someone named Birdy, postmarked from the tiny island of Ocracoke, part of the Outer Banks off North Carolina.

This, Serenity decides, is the signal she needs to change her life. Sure that she and Birdy are destined to fall in love, she buys a cottage in Ocracoke, sight-unseen, and heads out to the island.

The cottage is in miserable shape, with rickety steps, a warped front doorframe, torn screens, stained carpets, and more. Meanwhile, the most likely candidate to be Birdy is decades older than Serenity had expected and passionate only about beer and fishing.

Now, I was shouting at Serenity: “Run away!”

The novel’s only serious weakness is that it’s hard to believe that the dirt-obsessed Serenity would spend one minute in a cottage as broken and forlorn as this one, let alone purchase it. Author Linda K. Sienkiewicz tries to tackle that issue by having Serenity persuade herself that this was a challenge she could manage if that’s what it took “to sweep away the tears and cobwebs of betrayal from Birdy’s eyes.”

Serenity’s quest for true love veers through a series of nicely surprising turns, though the ending drags a bit. Helping her along is a community of oddball islanders, including her harried neighbor—a new mom and aspiring songwriter—and a 12-year-old boy who wants to play matchmaker between Serenity and his widowed, immigrant father. The author grabs all five senses with her vivid descriptions of people, places, and food.

This is a wonderfully quirky and different sort of story about a woman discovering her unexpected strength.