Quite tragically, Ellis Harrington is a victim of amnesia and knows nothing about her past. However, as part of her Identification Recovery Therapy, her psychoanalyst (Manfred J. Manfred, Ph.D., founder of the American Viennese Institute of Cranial De-Mystification) assigned her a weighty and challenging task: to create a substitute life for herself. The logic behind this stunningly original prescription? “You can’t go around not living a life just because you don’t know what yours is!”

Therefore, manifesting tremendous initiative, Ms. Harrington grabbed the 1954 Marietta, Georgia, phone book that had been gathering dust in Dr. Manfred’s office, probably for decades, and, with her eyes closed, allowed her index finger to point randomly yet momentously at whatever name it should find.

Ta da! That name was Ellis Harrington, and the rest is fast becoming history.

Of course, no one knows whether the original Ellis Harrington was male or female, even though women’s names weren’t generally published in phone books in 1954, especially in the South, but that information is purely circumstantial and would likely be thrown out of court, if ever the case progressed that far. Regardless, today’s Ellis Harrington very deeply appreciates the use of the name and would appreciate it even more if – assuming the original E.H. is still alive all these many years later – would appreciate it if she could borrow one of his or her credit cards as well, since she’s already grown comfortable with the name and knows how to spell it, and since trying to get a book accepted by a publisher nowadays isn’t exactly cheap.

In fact, when she first met her eventual co-author, B.R. Ingold (at an ATM machine, coincidentally), Ms. Ingold was attempting to make a withdrawal on her adoptive father’s bank card without benefit of a PIN number, which she couldn’t quite remember. So that was when the two writers discovered that they’d better come up with a best-selling book together because neither one, on her own, had enough ideas for more than a chapter or so, or enough money for lunch.

As for B.R. Ingold in particular -- well, she's just incredibly grateful for that chance meeting with her literary soul mate, especially since the national presidents of the Sierra Club and the Teamsters Union have recently joined forces to commend her as &#