AUNTIE LORETTE MILES, We’re Drunk and Outside

Loretta “Auntie Retta” Miles has spent more than forty years working, solving problems, helping others, and becoming the dependable woman everyone expects to hold things together. Now retirement is within reach—but Loretta has no idea what she is supposed to do with a life that no longer revolves around work. She owns a beautiful home in a suburb outside Chicago, but fear has gradually made her world smaller. Festivals feel dangerous. Farmers markets feel tense. Public spaces require constant vigilance. Loretta tells everyone she is simply a homebody, but deep inside she knows the truth: she has begun hiding from life. Then a repairman discovers the paintings filling her private studio, a business owner offers to purchase her work, and a last-minute opening appears on a four-week European wine, food, art, and history tour for Black women and women of the African diaspora. Loretta reluctantly boards the flight. What follows is a funny, emotional, and vividly sensory journey through Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Sicily. Loretta experiences the Douro River at sunrise, tastes wine grapes directly from the vine, works a harvest, rides a horse for the first time, paints a Spanish vineyard, learns to cook regional dishes, stands before art she once knew only from books—and falls backward into a vat of grapes while wearing her favorite cream pants. Through unfamiliar places, imperfect accommodations, long communal meals, and unexpected friendship, Auntie Retta begins reclaiming the artist, traveler, and joyful woman she placed on hold decades earlier. The International Aunties: We’re Drunk and Outside is a humorous and heartfelt story about retirement, travel, friendship, creativity, aging, and giving yourself permission to live differently. Because sometimes the safest life is not the one behind a locked door. Sometimes safety is knowing you are capable of stepping outside it.