Panicked, Desperate, Thirsty as Hell (Catskills, NY) "The world's gonna pop!" So begins a hilarious new memoir. In his latest book, A Drink With Kirsten, award-winning humorist Kirsten Beyer tells the story of two women’s attempt to lose their virginity in a summer cabin that is not quite the way they imagined it. A Drink With Kirsten recalls the trials and tribulations of four women who plan a weekend at a cabin in the woods as an unexpected escape from the everyday grind, and finds the perfect partner to take to the cabin with them. Once there, however, they realize that not all is as it seems: the cabin is haunted by the ghosts of the murdered men who once inhabited it; they realize that the three-day weekend has turned into three years; and as each new chapter opens with new catastrophes, the women struggle to survive the unnerving isolation, a drunken caretaker (who is not much of a caretaker), the hostile wilderness and a dark secret in the closet. In A Drink With Kirsten, Kirsten Beyer's hilarious, moving, and deeply moving memoir of three years spent in a log cabin with two friends, the author deftly takes the reader on a hilarious ride through her adventures in womanhood. In 2003, I went to the mountains of New York’s Catskills with my longtime friend Mary, an artist who lived out her entire life in her mother’s tiny apartment. A year earlier, Mary had turned her life upside down by moving out on her own for the first time. As a senior in college, she had finally found the courage to leave home and live in her own place for the first time—just at the point when all the rest of her friends were going back home and beginning their long journeys toward marriage and kids. But Mary was ready for the adventure. When we all finally arrived in the mountains of New York, she began to tell me about the many years she had spent there, all with the family she was about to leave. She spoke of the cabin, an apartment-size, log cabin with its own lake that sat high on a mountainside between two towns. It was her favorite place in the world. She had been going up there since she was four years old and had no intention of leaving. She was content to take her life one day at a time. She and her mother had recently spent many weeks there with the man she loved. And it was there that she had spent her own private graduation party—she had become the adult she had always dreamed of being. She said she wanted to keep that feeling. The man she loved asked her to marry him. Mary said yes. And they moved into the one-room cabin. But when Mary and I arrived at the cabin, we discovered that the previous tenants were still occupying the space. They had been there, all three of them, for nearly seven years, in the same spot. A family who had lived and died there was still present in the cabin—three people at a time. Mary’s mother, who was the landlord, had allowed the tenants to move in there illegally and rent the cabin as an Airbnb. The previous tenants never paid rent—just a set number of food points each week. But they could pay extra for meals, and when they were away, a friend could stay in their place. This meant that the last people there had been a woman and her two sons, in the cabin for nearly six years before Mary arrived, who were now living out their lives in the same space. Mary wasn’t just happy for them, she was thrilled. While all of this would make for a strange story for anyone else, it fit perfectly into the context of my own life. Mary was my oldest friend, and over the years, we had slowly been moving closer and closer together. Even though she hadn’t actually done anything, we called her the "It" in our group of friends. When we were together, Mary was always the center of attention. I would feel jealous and slightly out of place, even though she had never seemed to care about other men or her success at her job. She was in charge of everything. But I was thrilled for her—a new adventure was just what she needed. After we all settled into our rooms, Mary and I started up a private "commissary" that night. We had our first cup of hot chocolate with a little brandy we'd brought with us. We started looking for a recipe for a special dish Mary had always wanted to cook, which involved a hot dog. We opened a bottle of wine and decided that the only way we would ever get to bed was if we took turns sleeping and watching scary movies all night long. And so it began, the three of us: Mary, who was now in her early twenties, me, in my late thirties, and a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. We were a group of women drinking wine and falling in love for the first time and having what every woman wants from every man but no one ever admits: hot sex. I felt every bit the way I used to when I first went off to college and became aware that I was entering a world where everything was possible. It was the best weekend ever. One of the first things Mary mentioned was the caretaker, a man who lived on the property to keep an eye on things for the owners. He was actually a distant cousin of Mary’s and had come to take care of the place. He had spent his entire life around the lake, and he had lived in the cabin for a full seven years before Mary arrived. She said that he was a good man. She trusted him with everything, which was unusual for her: she always trusted no one. I also didn’t trust this man, but Mary did, because he was like her own personal dad, and he was always by her side. The caretaker was about twenty years older than Mary—in his early sixties—and was married to a woman who had taken off with the man who owned the cabin just a few years ago. Mary said that this was the one person she trusted. And of course I was jealous of that. The caretaker began to tell us stories of the people who had lived in the cabin before us. The former tenants were now gone, he said, but I heard a story that I thought was too fantastic for a cabin and its ghosts, but it seemed like Mary wouldn’t care. There were people who had died here, Mary said. Oh, yes, the caretaker said. He told us of a woman who had died alone and her husband had come to see her once, but he had seen her ghost many times and knew she was really dead and that he wasn’t welcome. Mary said that the caretaker kept saying, "Everyone knows that," and she seemed to agree. She never gave the story much thought. Later, we were in our rooms trying to get ready for bed, each trying to out-crazy the other. Mary had the caretaker leave a bottle of wine, which we drank out of our glasses—each taking turns drinking and taking turns being the sober one in the room. We talked about how wonderful Mary’s father was as an emergency doctor, and how he’d lost all of his medical licenses as a young man. Her mother was the one who worked as a nurse at St. Luke’s hospital in the city. Then she told us a story about her father, which she said was actually not a story about her father. The caretaker and his wife had both known Mary’s father, the father of her best friend, since the 1950s, when they’d all been kids. They had all grown up in the same neighborhood—the Village—and Mary’s father had had an older brother who had run away. Years later, the caretaker had run into that man when he was walking his dog down the street. When they met again, the man had told him that Mary’s father was the only one he’d ever trusted. The man had died young. Mary said she felt a sense of guilt because she hadn’t known about this. She hadn’t known any of it. She had been young and naïve, but now she wondered if he had been keeping her father’s secrets from her, as well. Mary thought that her father had never been completely honest with her about his brother. I thought that Mary was being overly dramatic, and I wanted to be in her room so badly, but I was always the first one back to my room every night. When it was my turn, I would be lying in bed, the lights turned off, and as soon as I began to fall asleep, I would be startled awake by the caretaker, who had climbed into my room from his. He was doing the exact same thing that I did. I stayed the night at the cabin and fell asleep to stories of other people who had died in that one room, in that one bed. The next day, as the sky grew lighter, we were up at sunrise, and I was drinking hot coffee and my friend was having hot milk and a small glass of brandy. We started to get ready for bed. We made our own beds together. We were in bed, making out in the dark, and the caretaker had climbed into our bed as he always did. We rolled onto our backs, and we didn’t know that