IF THEY ASKED ME I COULD WRITE A BOOK is a novelized memoir that covers many topics of concern to most of us, including adoption, alcoholism and Alzheimer's. It tells the story of three young women growing up in the 60s and how they overcome any obstacles set before them. In the main it tells the story of Annie Rosenberg Ryan, a vulnerable young girl who grows up in a dysfunctional Jewish family in Brooklyn, a borough of New York who not finding it at home, spends half a life time searching for love and security. Too often she goes to the wrong well. Annie, like her friends, comes of age during the time when Women's Lib was first becoming a phenomenon. Unfortunately, she has little sense of self nor how to survive without a man in her life. Her search is one that many women had to endure who grew up in the culture of the 60's. Besides Annie, there is her college friend, Maureen McDermott, Irish Catholic, confused herself and presently living in Greenwich Village in a cheap walk-up apartment after being expelled from Hunter College. She had been found in a compromising position with a young man in an empty class room. Both women drink a little too much. Only one becomes an alcoholic. Finally, there is Sabrina Aldrich, a self-assured young woman from a prominent family, who first befriends Maureen when they meet in the workplace, and later gets to know Annie. How these three women from different backgrounds, have so much in common and how they find their place in an uncertain world makes for an exceptional story; comical in parts and heartrending in others. What happens to each is based on real incidents and experiences. The dramatic story ends on that awful date of 9/11. All three women are living in Manhattan. All of their lives are affected by the vitriolic destruction of that terrible day. One lives close to the World Trade Center, another is a TV news reporter who first gets notice of a plane hitting the building, and finally, another's husband is a New York City firefighter. Who will survive? IF THEY ASK ME I COULD WRITE A BOOK is a page turner, and as an added bonus, there are real photographs of some of the protagonists within this readable novel.