Excerpt from Tango Lessons by Meghan Flaherty, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

This lesson, a decade later, was not at all like that, and I was not that dewy-hearted girl. This lesson and I both were disappointing. For a few futile moments, I pretended I was not in SoHo, New York City, but in Palermo Soho, Buenos Aires, lost inside that old framed photo of the world. But I was not. I was twenty-five years old and flailing. A failed actress and the daughter of a doubly broken home. By day, I languished in a cubicle; by night, beside a man who didn't want me. I knew I needed to do something, however bold or blind. This class, Basic Argentine Tango, Section A, was it.

I'd built it up. Stockpiled my nerve. Checked the website every day for months, vowing to sign up for the next cycle and then the next, until here I finally was: in ugly shoes on an ordinary Tuesday, teetering around an unassuming studio not six blocks from my office with a bunch of strangers. And all because I wanted to be different than I was. I wanted to be the kind of woman who took tango lessons.

I stood in line behind the maestro, trying to do what he did with my feet. Trying to feel something, anything, that wasn't lost. But then the hour struck. The maestro killed the music. Class was over. There had been no chivalry, no sacred ignorance. We hadn't so much as partnered up.

Excerpted from Tango Lessons: A Memoir by Meghan Flaherty. Copyright © 2018 by Meghan Flaherty. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.