A Place Called Grace

By: Alison Rand

Narrated by: Alison Rand

Struggling New York actress Alison has an outwardly good life: toned body, plenty of dates, a comfortable daily regimen. Still, she feels stagnant, empty, and as blocked as the river view from her Upper West Side apartment. Now divorced and in her mid-30s, she has never gotten past an early childhood trauma of being torn away from her brother and sister when her parents separated. Since then, nothing sticks. No one stays. She craves a sense of permanence, a place to call home.

To shake things up, Alison makes a bold, possibly foolhardy move - she relocates to bureaucracy-riddled Rome, where she barely speaks the language, knows no one except the elusive Casanova who gave her one vacation night of pleasure, and has no acting work waiting.

In a series of tragi-comic encounters, she tries to settle in to an exotic culture, looks for amore in all the wrong places, and begins to break into the acting world.

After a serious accident, Alison’s hopes for an Italian fantasy life come crashing down. Back in New York, the personal tragedies and career obstacles pile up until salvation arrives from an unexpected source.

A Place Called Grace is a humorous, hopeful, bittersweet contemporary memoir. It is a story of finding yourself amid the isolation and loneliness one can feel in modern-day life and shows how a seemingly unmoored existence can find its safe, solid center after all.

©2018 Alison Rand (P)2020 Alison Rand

A Moving Memoir

I found Alison Rand’s book to be so refreshing, particularly the emotional honesty she expressed in so many challenging areas of her life. Having first read the memoir, in listening to Ms. Rand’s voice on her audiobook, I found myself even more drawn in to the intimacy of her experiences. So many areas of the author’s life touched me: the longing for connection in both female friendships and in the intense desire for a long lasting romance with a man; the loyalty and love for her mother and father, along with the layers of complexity these relationships bring; her loving affection for her brother, as well as the friendship with Grace in Grace’s later years. How all of us would love to have a Grace in our lives. I highly recommend this audiobook.

I loved this book!

Alison writes with bravery, humor and compassion. I was very intrigued by her time in Rome. She's done what many have dreamed of but don't do. Both laugh out loud funny and rich with empathy, I read her book last summer at a time I needed a really good read. Now I am super impressed by the new audio version of her book. She does a wonderful job with the various accents and characters in her memoir. It's compulsively "listen-able". This is one multi talented lady!

Happy that she found herself

Lively and talented narrator. Sharing the times when you're not at your best, when you're discovering what you want vs what you need, is vulnerable. The author shares those stories here and I applaud her for being vulnerable.

A beautifully written memoir

A Place called Grace is a thoughtful and beautifully written memoir and an exceptional audiobook. The book is an account of Alison's life both in New York and Rome and the many interesting people she meets along the way. But the book also has a bigger story--it is a memoir of love, loss and finding connections in unexpected places. Highly recommend this touching audiobook.

I Wanted More of Alison’s Story

Torn from her siblings by parental choices that could not make sense to any child...
Alison survives and thrives with everything thrown at her as a young girl, a teen, and every decade thereafter.
Longing for closeness and mastering loneliness and disappointment, she befriends herself.
And in time, she notices the universe is consistently surrounding her with opportunities and people who she attracts just when there seems to be no hope.
With a wonderful sense of humor confronting the absurdities of life and life in Italy, Alison narrates a beautiful love story between her and her life. She writes with just enough description to keep it interesting as she describes like a journal the years she survived and worked so hard to thrive.
I wanted more and trust more is on the way.