The heart of a thirsty woman

the long version

For twenty-seven-year-old Josie Tolliver - a bookworm who has taken both William Shakespeare and Carlos Castaneda to heart - her hometown of Pick, Kentucky, is starting to feel very confining. It's 1976 and disco is alive and kicking, but Josie refuses to believe this. She daydreams of going West, convinced that if she can just get to Arizona or California, she'll find people on every street corner divulging the secrets of life. Josie's childhood sweetheart and now husband, Clarence, on the other hand, doesn't want to go anywhere. Clarence, a whiz at all things mechanical, dreams of expanding his TV repair shop into the first TV satellite-dish business in eastern Kentucky. The Heart of a Thirsty Woman is the exuberant, rollicking, and ultimately moving story of what happens when, through a series of calamities and mishaps, Josie heads West, dragging Clarence behind her.