A friend recommended a website called bookbub.com, which sends daily links to books that are generally available for $1.99. They may be by well-known authors or not. You can curate your lists to see only books in your preferred categories. I chose literary fiction, historical fiction, biographies, and women’s fiction.

A week ago, a book came up on my feed by Jonathan Tropper called “The Book of Joe.”

The summary said it was about a man who decided to go back to his home in Connecticut to visit his dying father. I didn’t know where in Connecticut the novel was set, but I clicked on it simply because of the Connecticut connection. I’ve lived in Connecticut for almost forty years. Maybe I’d see some places I knew in the book.

The narrator, Joe, is a best-selling author in New York City. After leaving his hometown of Bush Falls, Connecticut, he wrote a novel about his hometown that settled many scores, including with the basketball coach and members of the team. It turns out basketball was integral to this town’s sense of itself. Joe’s father was a member of the basketball team as was his brother, but Joe never made the team-- great set up, of course, for a revenge novel.

What did he think would happen when he turned up after ten years? Joe finds much to his astonishment that he is not welcome back at home. In fact, everybody hates him. The local book group throws their copies of his book on his front lawn. Someone throws a milkshake in his face at the local diner. A former member of the basketball team threatens to kill him and almost succeeds. Plus, there’s Joe’s high school girlfriend Carly, who is the editor of the small town newspaper. Does he still love her? Does she still love him?

“The Book of Joe” was a page-turner. Not like a spy thriller or detective story. It was a page-turner because it was beautifully written. Tropper has a way with words that is both ironic and insightful at the same time. His set piece where his agent tells him all the things his therapist should’ve told him is hilarious. I’m guessing his gift for clever send-ups of the entitled led to Tropper’s writing a screenplay for the new series starring Jon Hamm called “Your Friends and Neighbors.” Says Tropper about Hamm:

“There’s no denying that the man knows how to wear a suit. . . . It’s very hard to quantify. He has this characteristic where he can behave badly, but you will want to understand him and root for him.”

This could also be said of Joe. He’s lambasted and ridiculed almost his entire home town, yet we hope he can be forgiven.

It's a cliché, of course: You can’t go home again. But Joe can’t seem to leave, even after his father has died, masochistically subjecting himself to both abuse and excitement.

I spent my late teenage years in Princeton, New Jersey. A couple of years ago I attended a reunion of Princeton University’s theater where I had acted in a few plays. After fifty years, I expected to recognize few of the stores or buildings, but I was surprised to see a restaurant I recognized from my childhood. It’s called The Balt, which stands for Baltimore Dairy Lunch. When I was a kid and rode the milk truck with my grandfather from our dairy farm in Lawrenceville, New Jersey up to the pasteurizing plant in Somerville, we would stop off midway at the Balt for a donut for me and a cup of coffee for him. At 7am it was filled entirely by working men drinking coffee and rustling the pages of the local newspaper.

The Balt looks different these days. Now it looks like a University hot spot. It’s definitely spruced up a bit, although it has the same black-and-white tile floor, and the same stamped metal ceiling.

There are pictures on the wall of the way it looked back in the day, which of course means back in my day, which means over 50 years ago. Even though the coffee is now fancier than back in the day, The Balt still evoked that donutty feeling in me.

Why is it that we are so drawn to stories that remind us of the places we grew up? I think of Frank Bascombe, a newspaper writer in New Jersey in “Let Me Be Frank with You,” by Richard Ford. Bascombe’s fictional town, Haddan, is a composite of Princeton, Hopewell, and Pennington, all of which figure prominently in my dreams because they figure prominently in my childhood. Perhaps I was thinking of the fun I had spotting landmarks in “Let Me Be Frank with You” when I clicked on “The Book of Joe.”

I both lived and worked in Princeton. My grandparents had a horse farm called Ivy Rock in Hopewell. Even though I know I can’t recapture my childhood or the people I loved, I wanted to visit my mother’s grave with my three little girls, the children she never got to see. So I packed them up one weekend and drove to Ivy Rock in Hopewell to show them the tree where her ashes are buried.

The essay called “Under the Dogwood,” was published as part of a “miracle monocle micro-anthology” at the University of Louisville. Here’s the card that came tucked in my copy. I treasure it.

Here is the essay:

Under the Dogwood

We park in the space beneath the huge bell, the one I was always implored not to ring lest it rouse the neighbors to an emergency. I see the new owners have put an addition on the back of the stone farmhouse in Hopewell, New Jersey. I’ve already rehearsed my speech. There was no way to call ahead as I didn’t know who lived there. I knocked. A woman opened the door.

“Hi, this used to be my grandparents’ farm. We’re visiting from Connecticut. Would you mind if I show my daughters around?

“Of course, come in. Feel free to look around.”

The approach was familiar—a lane bordered by neat white fences along pastures that used to hold my grandfather’s racehorses – three retirees he said he’d care for until they died. The farm was sold ten years ago when my grandmother died. Today, I need to see it, show it to my little daughters, even though for them, it holds no memories, hoping they will intuit my connection with this bit of earth.

The house presents the same fieldstone face, square and upright, the stones varied in color with ivy climbing around the doorframe. The farm was named Ivy Rock. Two windows are centered on the first floor. Two identical windows peer out above. I can’t tell if the curtains are the crisp organdy of my grandmother’s day, a filmy flutter of misty fabric. Are they washed and starched each Monday as when I was a child? Is there a glass candy dish of m and m’s, a dish that no matter how carefully I lifted it, would always transmit a telltale signal to my grandmother that I was sneaking a treat?

Does one dining chair seat still hold a huge Audubon bird book to boost a granddaughter to table level? And the magazines—does the new owner read Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, the Reader’s Digest, tucked neatly in a magazine rack beside the leather armchair? Does a “grandmother clock,” half the size of the typical floor-to-ceiling grandfather variety, pose primly on the mantel with its inscrutable sun and moon icons where numbers should be, chiming out the hours of a well-regulated life?

After I admire the addition, we visit the barn. Today, it has no horses. Instead, a few chickens skitter and cluck around my daughters’ knees, scaring them, suburban children used only to gerbils and guinea pigs, predictable and caged.

I then usher my girls where I’ve intended all along – the dogwood tree in the front meadow. I planted it thirteen years ago after placing a square metal box in the hole I’d dug. The box, about eight by ten inches, with an engraved faceplate, held my mother’s ashes, dead at the age of fifty from breast cancer. I don’t remember who was there with me—my grandmother for sure, perhaps my brothers. But there were no prayers, no music, no remembrances. Just a shovel, dirt, and a small dogwood tree. This was what she wanted, her ashes to be buried under any tree at Ivy Rock. There had already been a service, a gathering of friends and relatives. We were out of words, numb and bereft beneath the afternoon sun shining on my grandmother’s rose garden nearby, standing in the space of a yawning future in an expanse of new mown grass.

My daughters are too young. I know that. They don’t know death, can’t imagine their mother won’t always be around serving chicken nuggets, making costumes for Japan Day at school or cheering at a soccer game. I hope they never find a note in my handwriting on yellow lined legal paper that’s labelled “Funeral Instructions,” specifying the flowers or music I’d like for my memorial.

As if we’d planned a picnic, I pose my little girls around the tree, like spring buds yet to unfold on a dogwood in April. Eleanor, my eldest, wears a red jumper, captured in the photo I tuck in an album. The girls’ blonde hair shimmers in the sun. They smile. Smile for mama.

I know we’ll never visit here again. I’ve used my one excuse to the stranger who lives where we once gathered for family dinners, swung from the huge old oak, gathered watercress down by the brook. I silently offer these children to the grandmother who never got to see them. “Here,” I say, “here is what I’ve done to honor you. These little girls, bright as the red geraniums you asked for, these are my memorial. “

The Story of Joe is not about going home in the sense of my essay, which revisits and honors my mother’s burial place. But as Joe discovers, going home can ignite old resentments and failures, as well as dreams.

I downloaded “This Is Where I Leave You,” another Tropper book, for my flight home from Lisbon last week, where I traveled with those same three daughters—now all in their thirties. In this book, four siblings are commandeered to sit shiva for seven days after their father’s death and make small talk with a slew of neighbors when not fighting among themselves. The narrator, Judd, is getting divorced, after discovering that his wife is sleeping with his boss. Like Joe, he has a high school girlfriend, who may or may not be able to console him. Tropper’s protagonists may not be able to recapture the youthful hijinks from their hometowns, but they try like hell. And, as Tropper said of Jon Hamm, we root for them.