Escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, Portia Kane returns to the South Jersey home of her youth and resolves to save herself by assisting a beloved English teacher who has retired after a traumatic incident.

When his mother dies, thirty-eight-year-old Bartholomew Neil, who doesn't know how to be on his own, discovers a letter in his mother's underwear drawer that causes him to write a series of highly intimate letters to actor Richard Gere, while embarking on a quest to find out where he belongs.

During the years he spends in a neural health facility, Pat Peoples formulates a theory about silver linings: he believes his life is a movie produced by God, his mission is to become physically fit and emotionally supportive, and his happy ending will be the return of his estranged wife, Nikki. When Pat goes to live with his parents, everything seems changed: no one will talk to him about Nikki; his old friends are saddled with families; the Philadelphia...

Although seventeen-year-old Amber Appleton is homeless, living in a school bus with her unfit mother, she is a relentless optimist who visits the elderly at a nursing home, teaches English to Korean Catholic women with the use of rhythm and blues music, and befriends a solitary Vietnam veteran and his dog, but eventually she experiences one burden more than she can bear and slips into a deep depression.

Based on the bestselling book by Matthew Quick, the riotous and poignant story of how a man who has lost everything, his house, his job, his wife, reconnects with himself and creates his own silver linings from the bonds he forms with his family and friends. "I say good for Russell for risking a protagonist who requires some patience and forgiveness."--Michael Phillips "... is so good, it could almost be a terrific old classic."--Roger Ebert "......

Although seventeen-year-old Amber Appleton is homeless, living in a school bus with her unfit mother, she is a relentless optimist who visits the elderly at a nursing home, teaches English to Korean Catholic women with the use of rhythm and blues music, and befriends a solitary Vietnam veteran and his dog, but eventually she experiences one burden more than she can bear and slips into a deep depression.