Being Erica:

Erica Strange is bright, beautiful, charming and tends to wear every emotion on her sleeve. She's bursting at the seams with potential, but has somehow lost the thread of her own story. Basically, she is in a rut - single, working a dead-end job, seemingly aimless and living in an apartment she has had since university.

As a middle-class kid from a dysfunctional Jewish family, Erica has yet to meet her parents' lofty expectations of pursuing a well-paid, respectable profession, meeting a nice Jewish boy, settling down and producing lots of grandchildren. Although she successfully graduated from university with a Bachelor of Arts and Masters in English Literature, Erica's 'juvenile fantasies' (as her parents put it) of becoming a writer have not quite panned out the way she hoped.

Instead, Erica finds herself working an inconsequential job selling insurance, just to get by with a steady paycheck. At the age of 32, Erica appears to be going nowhere: her career dreams are on hold (indefinitely, it seems) and she has been in and out of the dating scene without a meaningful relationship to show for it. Unable to move forward in life, she often finds herself reflecting on her past: her dysfunctional upbringing, the time she lost her virginity, the time she bailed on her Bat Mitzvah, that tragic day her brother Leo died...

Despite her regrets, Erica always tries to maintain a positive attitude and sense of humour about her less than ideal life. Following one particularly bad day, during which she is fired from her customer service job, stood up by her date, and hospitalised after an allergic reaction, Erica finds herself at rock bottom - that is, until she meets Dr Tom.