A woman receives a terminal brain cancer diagnosis in a conference room while wearing a terra-cotta dress. Instead of grieving, she asks her two teenage daughters what they want. Her sixteen-year-old says: “I give you permission to die at 28. Find us a father.”

In ninety days, the mother conducts 651 first dates, survives three sexual assaults, evaluates four finalists, and marries the last man standing thirteen days after meeting him. Then the diagnosis turns out to be medically uncertain.

The marriage holds anyway. This is the receipts.

Transactional Love is simultaneously a memoir, a dating manual, a theological argument, a parenting document, a five-tradition reference system, a Hebrew sexual lexicon, and the most honest book about what women actually think that has ever been published with a real name attached.