It’s just about the middle of summer in a summer characterized by utter chaos, but I come bearing something rare in this era: good tidings. That is, the good news that new books are out today. Below, you’ll find twenty-three just-published offerings to consider in fiction and nonfiction, which span a remarkable gamut of topics, themes, and genres.

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There are many exciting fiction debuts, including novels from Lisa Smith, Natalie Guerrero, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, and Morgan Ryan, featuring WWII witches, multigenerational Caribbean families, and more. You’ll likewise see anticipated work from up-and-coming and established authors, including Kashana Cauley and Hannah Pittard.

And in nonfiction, there are explorations of Amelia Earthart’s much-mythologized life and career; a look at how the game Monopoly was used for espionage during World War II; a fresh t@ke on how social media is #changing English ;); lyrical essays from Katherine Larson on kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art of repairing and lacquering over broken pottery; a deep dive into the phenomenon of headaches; and more.

I hope you’ll find joy, curiosity, surprise, and comfort in these in a time when all of these—minus surprise—seem in short supply. Add these to your to-be-read piles!

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Hannah Pittard, If You Love It, Let It Kill You

(Holt)

“Hannah Pittard’s If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a masterclass in autofiction: incisive, hilarious, heartbreaking, and mercilessly candid. This novel, its narrator makes clear, is ‘neither a comedy nor a tragedy but something much worse: real life.’ If You Love It, Let It Kill You is Pittard’s most impressive and innovative book yet.”

–Maggie Smith

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, The Other Wife

(Riverhead)

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“Tender, wise, and thoroughly compelling, The Other Wife teems with the complicated pleasures and desolations of longing. Jackie Thomas-Kennedy knows a great deal about the life-shaping strength of desire.”

–R. O. Kwon

Natalie Guerrero, My Train Leaves at Three

(One World)

“The balance between ambition and authenticity swirls throughout Guerrero’s coming-of-age debut as Xiomara strives to break out and become a star while grappling with the loss of her sister. The book is set against the lively backdrop of Washington Heights, which feels as much of a character as any of the people in the book. It’s as equally soft and sweet as it is biting. Guerrero’s writing is fully charged from the jump.”

–Debutiful

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Katherine Larson, Wedding of the Foxes: Essays

(Milkweed)

“Lyric, gritty, vulnerable, tender, formally smart, powerfully quiet, the book finds in twilight and shadow depths nuanced feeling and reflection. Poet and biologist Katherine Larson finds herself in this ‘age of grief and extinction’ building a home for herself inside Japanese literature. Among her inspirations are Tanizaki and Godzilla, along with Bachelard, Ponge, and Sontag…a brilliant book and one to treasure in a time of extremity.”

–Alison Hawthorne Deming

Mari Andrew, How to Be a Living Thing: Meditations on Intuitive Oysters, Hopeful Doves, and Being Human in the World

(Penguin Life)

“A beautiful book on bringing out the better angels of our nature. By carefully observing the animal kingdom, Mari Andrew brilliantly illuminates how we can get in closer touch with our humanity.”

–Adam Grant

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Simon Boas, A Beginner’s Guide to Dying

(Vintage)

“Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life’s most profound moments. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth, and wisdom, offering a deeply moving and unexpectedly funny meditation on mortality. I read this manuscript in a single afternoon, laughing and crying in equal measure, and knew I had to bring it to readers. His voice is one that lingers—both a celebration of life and a guide to its inevitable end.”

–Julie McFadden

Kashana Cauley, The Payback

(Atria Books)

“In an Afrofuturist world of barbaric debt police and an absurd heist to bring it all down, The Payback is a delightfully dark comedy of three coworkers-turned-conspirators hell-bent on revenge. This trio of Robin Hoods taking matters into their own hands out of grief and desperation will have you alternating between raucous laughs and fear for their safety. California strip malls, 80s fashion, punk and hacker culture, all combine in a tenacious cocktail of sweet justice.”

–Xochitl Gonzalez

Lisa Smith, Jamaica Road

(Knopf)

“Young love, enduring friendship and the complexity and vibrancy of multi-generational Caribbean families set in 1980s London, this moving coming-of-age novel tackles contemporary issues of race, class and belonging. Smith’s evocative prose had me thinking about Connie and Daphne long after I closed the book. An impressive debut from an exciting new voice.”

–Diana McCaulay

Kyung-Ran Jo, Blowfish (trans. Chi-Young Kim)

(Astra House)

“Kyung-Ran Jo’s Blowfish, rendered into English with poised and perceptive grace by Chi-Young Kim…invites readers into a profound exploration of the elusive contours of identity, the lingering ache of trauma, and the fragile, often unspoken language of human connection….With each precisely chosen phrase and carefully rendered scene, Jo crafts a world that is both hauntingly beautiful and profoundly unsettling…will linger in the quiet yet unsettling corners of the mind.”

–Tony Huang

Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

(Knopf)

“Packed with fascinating facts, of-the-moment observations, and a sparkling voice, Algospeak is a gift to any word nerd. Deftly covering everything from emoji etymologies and trendbait to Taylor Swift fanilects, incel slang, and the true origins of ‘cool’ words, Adam Aleksic is the wise, yet accessible internet linguistics oracle we need.”

–Amanda Montell

Jennifer Dasal, The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris

(Bloomsbury)

“In this vivid story of Belle Époque Paris, the art historian Dasal shines a light on a legendary female boardinghouse for expats, the American Girls’ Club in Paris. From 1893, ‘the Club’ played host to a generation of independent young artists – complete with cameos from Emmeline Pankhurst and Gertrude Stein.”

–The New York Times Book Review

Ben Weissenbach, North to the Future: An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska

(Grand Central Publishing)

“North to the Future is packed with fascinating and eccentric adventurer/scientists, hair-raising wildlife encounters and haunting landscapes—all in the tradition of his teacher, John McPhee. But Weissenbach offers a contrasting dimension unique to a writer of his era: how all this reality feels to a twenty-something raised on the airless virtual world of the 4’x2′ screen. The book thus carries a double warning: of a threatened external environment and an internal one, too.”

–John Colapinto

Issa Quincy, Absence

(Two Dollar Radio)

“Through its archive of narratives nestled within narratives, this exquisite novel creates a beguiling soundscape of echoes and murmurs that reverberates in the mind long after the reading. In lucid, captivating prose, Issa Quincy constructs a palimpsest composed of the fractals and losses that define the numberless strata of the past. Recalling the novels of W. G. Sebald and the films of Chris Marker, Absence is a mournful and luminous meditation on the work of remembering.”

–Christine Lai

Sonoko Machida, The Convenience Store by the Sea (trans. Bruno Navasky)

(Putnam)

“Machida’s novel weaves together individual stories to form a detailed, lush picture of relationships and their fuel, notably the care taken with the food and beverages sold by the convenience store…a timely, lovely, and much-needed escape into a world of care for and consideration of others. Machida’s comforting and cozy read should resonate with fans of TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea.”

–Library Journal

Mark Kurlansky, Cheesecake

(Bloomsbury)

“Vibrant, funny, and at times bittersweet….Longtime New Yorkers may feel wistful for a bygone neighborhood so lovingly rendered…and others will enjoy this glimpse of a small town within a metropolis. Mark Kurlansky lends his considerable skills to this loving tribute to Manhattan’s Upper West Side during the booming 1980s.”

–Shelf Awareness

Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

(Norton)

“Strata, like its subject, is deep and richly layered with stories–of the planet, and of the people doggedly trying to decipher the tales locked within its rocks. It left me with a profound appreciation of our world, and the sheer amount of history upon which we stand.”

–Ed Yong

Laurie Gwen Shapiro, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon

(Viking)

“Laurie Gwen Shapiro has dug deep into the archives, and emerged with an exhilarating tale of the adventurous life of Amelia Earhart and the remarkable relationship that helped to forge her legend. Yet Shapiro goes even further–stripping away the myths and revealing something far more profound and intricate and true. The Aviator and the Showman is one terrific book.”

–David Grann

Philip E. Orbanes, Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game of Monopoly to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes

(Harper)

“In Monopoly X, Phil Orbanes weaves together a fascinating story about Monopoly’s previously unknown role in World War II. With skill befitting the best novelists, Orbanes takes the reader on a ride through the twists and turns of great spy fiction—only the story he’s telling is true.”

–Steve Dubnik

Kerry Cullen, House of Beth

(Simon & Schuster)

“[P]erfectly captures that tenuous moment in your twenties when your adult life doesn’t yet have a solid foundation. Cassie…decides to walk away from New York City and her job in publishing, only to end up in a marriage, a ghost story, and a new life so strange that it matches the strangeness she has always carried inside her. A lovely story about how even though unraveling a life can be dangerous, there are possibilities in the heart of that darkness.”

–Ann Napolitano

Morgan Ryan, A Resistance of Witches

(Viking)

“Morgan Ryan’s historical fantasy debut is World War II meets A Discovery of Witches…I raced through this one—A Resistance of Witches is a witchy war-time delight!”

–Kate Quinn

Tom Zeller Jr., The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief

(Mariner Books)

“For a condition that affects fifty million Americans, migraine is surprisingly poorly understood and, as a research topic, grievously underfunded. By turns personal (cluster headache! God almighty!) and journalistic, The Headache explores the mysterious nature of headache pain and, equally mysterious, the whims of federal funding and the biases that underlie the condition’s neglect. Zeller writes with intelligence, compassion, equanimity, and wit. Required reading.”

–Mary Roach

Richard Mabey, The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness, and the Space in Between

(NYRB)

“These are wide-ranging debates that cover the gender-fluid nature of plants, decolonization, migration, native/nonnative, reparations for nature through the lens of the wood, the lawn, the pond and the flowerbed. I felt like I’d spent a great afternoon, lying in the dappled shade of a garden tree, listening to Mabey muse on a life with plants.”

–Gardens Illustrated

Tanya Talaga, The Knowing: How Indigenous Oppression Continues to Echo Today

(Hanover Square Press)

“The story of one woman gone missing becomes the story of all the children who never came home. Tanya Talaga fearlessly takes on Canadian History and presents it through the lens of indigenous experience….In a time when denialists are finding their whitewashed story on the bestseller lists, Talaga provides an antidote…beautiful, often heartbreaking prose…a handbook for reaching beneath the myths of Canadian history.”

–Michelle Good

Where to start? This week’s new releases are an all-you-can-read buffet

NPR

Step right up, folks: It’s an all-you-can-read buffet, with flavors to suit virtually every palate.

Only press your face up to the proverbial sneeze guard, and you’ll note selections of fiction here, nonfiction there, as well as one book that teeters tipsily between them. Here you’ll find horrors born of folklore, time-travel larks and short stories grounded in local detail — even hard science that is quite literally grounded, concerned with the rocks that tell of our planet’s inconceivably deep past.

Please, don’t be shy. Fill up on seconds and thirds, if you’d like! Note that our next course will not be served until next week.

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Del Rey

The Bewitching, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Back in 2016, discussing a previous novel, Moreno-Garcia mentioned to NPR’s All Things Considered that she grew up on her great-grandmother’s stories of witches, in an environment in which “fact and fiction were fairly mixed.” Some nine years and eight novels later, it’s clear those old witch stories still have a tenacious grip on the author of Mexican Gothic. Her latest book centers on Minerva, a graduate student weaned on her own great-grandmother’s stories of witch encounters — sound familiar? Let’s hope for the author’s sake that that’s about as far as life reflects art, given the horrors that await Minerva when those lingering memories and her studies bear frightening fruit.

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MIRA

The Girl I Was, by Jeneva Rose

Few figures can draw down our wrath quite like our past selves. The wrong turns, the lost opportunities, the cringe-inducing miscues, it would have been nice if, from time to time, you could just go back in time and bawl out the blundering fool responsible. Rose, a deft hand with mystery and romance, has fun granting that rather mixed blessing to the woebegone lead of her latest novel, who, nearing middle age, gets the chance to confront the person she was in college, face to face, time paradoxes be damned.

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Henry Holt & Co.

If You Love It, Let It Kill You, by Hannah Pittard

OK, this gets complicated: Pittard’s new novel is a thinly fictionalized story about discovering that her ex-husband had written a thinly fictionalized novel of his affair and their divorce, which in turn had been closely preceded — in both fiction and real life — by that same ex-wife’s memoir about said affair and divorce, which in turn … and so on. Follow all that? There are more layers to this recursive morass of heartbreak, betrayal, autofiction and the ethics of mining one’s life for material, but that’s probably sufficient to make what appears to be the salient point here: Never, under any circumstances, date a writer.

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Tin House Books

Make Your Way Home, by Carrie R. Moore

In Moore’s debut short story collection, “home” for the book’s mostly Black cast means the American South — if you’re reading the word in a literal sense, that is. But, of course, there are other ways to read it too: The 11 naturalistic stories collected here all in some way circle back to what it means to lose or still seek your home. Or, for better or worse, to find that you were always home already.

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W.W. Norton & Company

Strata: Stories from Deep Time, by Laura Poppick

It can be fun (and frightening) to imagine humans at the center of everything but, the truth is, we arrived awfully late to the party. Humans have been around for a vanishingly small fraction of the Earth’s roughly 4.5-billion-year life so far. So, latecomers that we are, it’s only natural to ask: What did we miss, guys? Science journalist Poppick’s first book offers an accessible introduction to what we know of the vast, obscure past that predates us, one layer of rock at a time. In these layers are recorded the cataclysmic transformations that have shaped the place we call home.

My Ex’s Autofiction Has Me Bouncing Off the Walls

Hannah Pittard Share article

An excerpt from If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard

Today I am restless, I text my friend Jane from the bathroom.

It’s a Sunday, early fall, the day of my nephew’s sixth birthday party. Yesterday was his actual birthday. I made three varieties of mac’n’cheese from scratch. He informed me—a few hours before dinner and later made good on the threat—that he would be eating none of them. I let his littlest brother pick the pasta shape instead: wagon wheel.

That was last night. Now I’m in the bathroom, my bathroom, mine and the bald man’s with whom I share my bed. It’s on the second floor of our house. I’m watching my father, eighty this year, park his orange MINI in front of the neighbor’s house across the street. My sister and her family live one house down from there. Her backyard is where the party is happening.

One week ago, Jane called to tell me my ex had written me into his debut novel.

“He means to keep it a secret,” she said.

“From the world?” I asked.

“Only from you,” she said.

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“You don’t like the book?”

“I don’t like your portrayal.”

“How am I?”

“Smug,” she said. “Insecure.”

“If I were an angry and unsatisfied man,” I said, “that’s exactly how I’d describe a woman with ambition, too.”

Jane said, “You’ve got the hang of this already. You’ll be fine.”

I explained the situation to my boyfriend, the bald man. I told him that my ex had written me into his novel, one allegedly about our toddler of a marriage and his affair with my dear friend.

“Why a secret?” I asked. “Why from me?”

My boyfriend shrugged. “Maybe because you’ve written a memoir about the very same toddler.”

I shook my head. “But that’s not a secret.”

He said, “Going into this relationship, I thought I was the only one with shared custody.” He is referring to his daughter, the eleven-year-old, who lives half her life with her mother and half her life with us.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Writers,” he said, with not a little bit of disgust, before leaving the room.

There’s a bounce house at my sister’s and lots of booze. I haven’t seen the booze yet—I’m still in a bathroom on the other side of the street—but I saw the bounce house earlier when my boyfriend helped my sister move a tiny desk from her garage attic to the six-year-old’s bedroom. The desk is what? A gift maybe?

There wasn’t supposed to be a bounce house, but my sister caved. Everyone knew she would cave, including the six-year-old, so there were never any tantrums. Earlier this week, my sister sent an announcement regarding the bounce house. When I showed my boyfriend, he said he’d never before seen an amended birthday invite for a little kid. I suggested anticipated attendance must be down, which was a joke, because my sister’s boys have birthday parties that rival your best New Year’s Eve.

I’m sitting atop a small white storage container, inside which are spare razors, spare toilet paper rolls, spare soap bars, spare bandages, spare liter bottles of shampoo, spare bags of cotton balls, and I’m waiting for Jane to respond. I’m lamenting life, I text. Jane’s a Shakespearean and lives one-point-two miles away in a house that gets great light.

Last week, after getting off the phone with her, I googled my ex-husband for the first time in seven years. I was hoping for more news of his clandestine novel. In doing so, I accidentally discovered a story he’d written in which I’d been knifed to death by a homeless man. For several years, I’ve been walking around with no idea! I liked my ending, which was dramatic but without fuss. The homeless man gets in several quick jabs, all of them meaningful. There’s no chance of recovery.

I told my boyfriend that he and I had been turned into characters in a story by my ex. “We’re married,” I said.

“Only in our hearts,” he said.

“Your name is Bruce.”

He nodded. “I like that. Do I still have a daughter?”

“You do.”

“Good,” he said. “And I’m still bald?”

“It’s unstated.”

“I like being bald.”

I did not tell him I’d been murdered, and he did not think to ask.

My boyfriend-husband—I’ll borrow the name Bruce—has been part of my family for only five years. He is still learning our rope tricks. When my mother calls, for instance, I ask her immediately, “Have you fallen off a horse? Are you feeling sick? Have you gotten a diagnosis? Are you trapped in the attic again? Do you have intentions of climbing a tree while tied to a chain saw?” In this family, if you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get all the information.

Jane texts, Restless how? Lamenting what? Say more. I send her a picture of the spider plant in the corner of my bathroom and several dozen of its babies, whose roots are soaking in jam jars I’ve crammed along the windowsill. Jane, who, like me, is childless by choice, writes, Freudian.

I’d be sitting on and texting from the lip of my clawfoot bathtub if I could, but it’s fiberglass, and I’d dislodge the water supply lines were I ever to put any sort of weight on it. When Bruce and I bought three years ago, we assumed the bathtub was original to the house (1927), which means I assumed the tub was cast-iron and coated in porcelain. You spend forty-five minutes in what will likely be the most outrageous purchase of your life; you have no idea what you’re getting. I’ve spent more time looking at jeans online today than I spent in this house before deciding to buy it.

“Today I am lamenting life,” I said to Bruce first thing this morning, when we woke up yet again before sunrise.

He said, “Is this an all-day activity?”

I said, “Intermittent, I think.”

Then we had a quick fight about his early departure from the mac’n’cheese dinner. Dishes had been cleared. Monologues had begun. He slapped his knees, popped up from the table, and said he was tired and therefore going home.

Bruce’s daughter also popped up, declaring her own fatigue. She didn’t clear her napkin or her water glass, and I didn’t notice until after she and her father had already left. I didn’t want to stay at my sister’s house and hear any more monologues, but even less did I want to leave as some sort of family unit in which groupthink and joint decisions might appear the dominant mood.

My ex wants to keep secrets, and I want to confess:

I have never been pregnant.

I do not like children.

I am surrounded by family.

I often lie awake in bed at night and think, When they are dead, I will . . .

I have an oral fixation.

I dislike most people.

I am tired of men.

I am fascinated by the simplicity of erect penises.

I am haunted by my childhood.

I am living too much in the iterative tense, I text Jane.

The iterative what? she asks, playing dumb for my benefit.

The tense of routine, I write.

She responds with a picture of her entryway. The sun across the floor is disgusting.

Outside, my father is still in his MINI, the driver’s-side door wide open. I consider taking a picture then decide against it. He’s on a call. This—parked car, door open, speakerphone on—is his preferred mode of doing business. I send a text to my mother, saying that her first ex-husband is already here and that she should stop by my house for a quick glass of wine before heading to the party.

My sister and I (and our mother and our father)—we all live in Kentucky now. It’s a long story, but I moved here first—years ago and with my ex. We never intended to stay. But now he is gone, and my family is here. “FOMO,” my mother said when she heard of my father’s decision to move to Lexington last year. “I divorced him forty years ago and moved out of state, only to have him show up in my backyard, not a mile from the place I’ll likely die.”

Bruce has spent the better part of the morning grumbling about my nephew’s shindig. He’d rather stay home and reread Beloved, which he’ll be teaching next week. Like me, Bruce is a professor of English (Americanist). Jane is also a professor of English, as is her husband, Teddy (another Shakespearean).

I zoom in on Jane’s entryway. I text, That’s a gorgeous rug. Is it new?

My immediate neighbor, a professor of mathematics, is walking down his driveway whistling. I’m watching him and am thrilled to witness the precise moment when his whistling stops, and he becomes aware of the giant man in a cowboy hat sitting in an orange MINI parked in the wrong direction on the opposite side of the street having a loud conversation. My neighbor is north of seventy himself. I see my father see my neighbor. If there is a standoff, my father will win. His entitlement isn’t just willful, it’s pathological. “Entitlement” is the wrong word anyway. Better to say that he is notably undeterred by the environment around him.

I’ve always been an inquisitive, even nosy, person. Eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers is among my favorite hobbies. But it wasn’t until Bruce and I moved into this house—and I began paying very special attention to the math professor, his wife, and their four adult children, all of whom still live at home—that I purchased a pair of binoculars for outright spying. Actually, I purchased two pairs. Bruce sometimes joins me. The fact that he will occasionally turn off all the downstairs lights and call quietly up to me in my attic office and tell me to come down fast because the neighbors are acting curiously; the fact that he will crouch next to me as we skulk from window to window trying to get a better view of them . . . Well, that he tolerates, even encourages, this proclivity speaks volumes about our relationship and the reasons it persists.

Plus, there is the house. We are each separately in love with its brick walls and wraparound porch. We have more columns than anyone else on the street, including my sister. Last week, Bruce’s students told him that he talks about me a lot. A student we share, Camille, told the class that I did the same. This delighted his students. He told them we talk about each other so much because we still like one another, which can’t be said of all couples. I asked him if his assertion amused or terrified them. (There’s a steep learning curve for students in Kentucky between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Some seem as though they’ve known since childhood that life is an unkind joke to be fretted over dusk until dawn, while others appear to believe their parents have never regretted a single decision.) By way of an answer, he said, “It’s the Faulkner class.”

I text Jane, I’m desperately looking for small secrets to distract me from this brewing unhappiness. Yesterday it was a pair of Spanish leather boots that, when they arrive, I will tell Bruce I’ve owned since boarding school. Today it’s indoor plants, which, when he notices them a week from now, I will say have been inside since June.

She texts back immediately, Boarding school strains credulity.

I write, grad school then.

She writes, You had money in grad school?

I write, credit cards and debt. I send her a link to the Spanish boots.

Bruce and I have been married in our hearts since last year, about an hour and a half before his first colonoscopy. Because we aren’t legally married, the kindly young man at check-in was resistant to my status as emergency contact. (The state of Kentucky takes its marriage laws and hospital forms quite seriously.) Things got heated, and Bruce—tall, broad shouldered, originally from Decatur, Illinois, and not a little un-scary when he’s nervous or angry—declared loudly: “Sir, we are married in our hearts.”

After a beat, the young man (he was wearing mascara) blushed and pushed the clipboard in my direction. “Just write wife,” he whispered.

While Bruce stared coldly at the wall in front of him, I wrote Wife next to my name and tried for an air of contrition. It’s my fault we’re not married.

Several years ago—after my divorce, after my husband, then still a colleague, cheated on me with the woman, my dear friend, who’d originally introduced us—a graduate student of mine suggested that if things ever got serious again with another person, I ought to keep it weird. My student hadn’t kept it weird: she was married with a daughter. But she seemed to have a firm and honest grasp on her situation as wife and mother, as well as on the incongruities of the world. (She once handed in a story to workshop in which a mermaid was roasted over an open fire and served to guests as a delicacy.) I was very much in the market for advice from interesting, clear-eyed, and absurd-minded women; I adopted hers with fervor.

About the time my ex was killing me in his fiction, I was explaining to Bruce that I did not want to be married to him, or anyone else, ever again. I wanted to keep it weird.

About the time my ex was killing me in his fiction, I was explaining to Bruce that while I wanted to buy a house with him and was even willing to help raise his daughter, I did not want to be married to him, or anyone else, ever again. I wanted to keep it weird.

By keeping it weird, I assumed—naively—that I could skirt the official role of stepmother, a title I’ve despised ever since my father married a deeply sadistic architect when I was ten years old. My hope was that, despite living with Bruce’s daughter half of every week, despite making extravagant dinners for her and cutting out giant hand-stenciled letters on her birthday and at the end of every school year, I’d somehow continue to exist merely as the eccentric childless girlfriend who happened to own fifty percent of a house with her father.

All semester I have been pestering my students about the perils of abstraction, but now I text Jane, It’s not a desire for infidelity or even something romantic outside the relationship, but it’s parallel. When I’m not writing, I feel udderless. Instead, my brain is lustful for Otherness without feeling actual lust and honestly despising, even fearing, the actuality of Otherness.

I reread my text. Then I add, *r*udderless.

She writes, my Freudian hackles are up, up, up!

I write, Basically I am aware of my domestication and would like one week as a wolf caterwauling at the moon, after which I’d likely be happy as a quokka for several more years.

Before she can ask, I send her a screenshot of a smiling, pint-size marsupial with the hashtag “quokkaselfie.” She sends me a picture of her guest bedroom/office. The sunlight is obscene. I search my archive, then send a photo of our new dining room table. She writes, talk about strong rug game. Is THAT new? Then she says, Teddy likes it too, and I wonder if she is signaling that we are not alone.

I know about signaling via text. Jane and I are not lovers. We just have a sympathetic view of life’s illogicalities.

Jane knows that my lamentations have at least something to do with my ex and his book, but neither of us is tedious enough to say so. I send her a picture of my attic office, which I’ve recently rearranged. In a single photograph, there is a stuffed barracuda, a zebra rug, several skulls, a seventeenth-century rug, an art deco mirror, the skeleton of a piranha, and a ship captain’s chair—all of it inheritance from my mother, who, about five years ago, decided to stop buying gifts and start giving away her possessions.

Jane writes, you’re a bohemian!

I write, In my heart I am a mid-century minimalist.

She writes, Can anyone with a child in her life be a minimalist?

I write, Can anyone with any kind of person?

Early on, things with Bruce’s daughter were fine. If I was, say, standing behind her when the UPS man knocked and she opened the door, she’d shove a thumb over her shoulder in my direction and say, “That’s not my mother.”

I’d say, without hesitation, “And that’s not my daughter.”

When her father wasn’t in the room, she’d sometimes sidle up next to me and whisper, apropos of nothing, “I’ll never kiss you. Never ever.”

“That’s good,” I’d whisper back, “because I don’t want to be kissed by you ever ever.”

But now, three years later, she seeks me out while I am in the kitchen cooking dinner. She kisses my arm. She hugs my waist. She smiles whenever I make eye contact. She plays my favorite Guy Clark songs and sings along with me, especially during “L.A. Freeway.” She beams when I go loud about the landlord: “. . . sonaBITCH has AL-WAYS BORED ME!”

Recently, as if to spook me, she said, out of nowhere, “You’re basically my mom.”

With fear in my heart and a knife in my hand, I said, “No. You have a mother, and it’s not me.”

She said, “Yeah, but basically.”

Three kids tumble out of a giant SUV that’s pulled momentarily into our driveway. A mother scuttles after them. The driver, presumably the father, backs up and pulls away. Is he looking for parking? Or going home? I tag the picture of Jane’s spare bedroom and write, Such a gift, which is a joke between us, a nod to our students who traffic in canned language and hackneyed expressions.

My mother texts, Can I park in your driveway? I give it a thumbs-up. Then I snap a quick photo of the street below, crowded with my sister’s guests’ cars and my father’s MINI, whose driver’s-side door is shut now. How did I miss him shambling inside? He’s had two hip replacements, but he still walks four miles every day. My mother still runs. I come from a family of akathisians, which is a fancy way of saying we can’t sit still.

A few days ago, my father called me, weeping. He wanted to talk about my mother and their divorce, now four decades in the past.

“I’m sorry for everything,” he said.

“No more talk of the divorce,” I said. “No more childhood, no more apologies. You promised.”

“I feel things,” he said. “I feel things more than most people.”

“I’m busy,” I said.

“I hate days like this,” he said. “I didn’t sleep worth a turd last night. I’m an emotional guy, you know?”

“I’ve got class,” I told him. “I can’t do this right now.”

“Do you think I could hurt myself? Your sister thinks I could hurt myself. I left my guns with her this morning.”

“I’m hanging up now. Is that all right?”

“Criminal,” he moans. “This is criminal.”

In the background I heard the slosh of water. “Are you in the tub right now?” I asked. “Are you taking a bath? Are you calling me from the bathtub again? We talked about this.”

“I can’t get the water hot enough. I’m creaky all over, and I can’t get it hot enough. My regular masseuse isn’t answering.”

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Before I could disconnect, my father hung up on me, which is how he ends every phone call with anyone ever, and he texted my brother: Your sister is a heartless woman. My brother sent me a screenshot of the text with a thumbs-up emoji followed by a winking smiley face. I sent him the middle finger. My brother lives in Denver and runs hundred-milers and says things like, “My body is my temple.” He is universally adored. He’ll never move east.

I open the door to my bathroom slowly, as though I am an intruder, as though I am up to no good and desperate not to be discovered. The sensation of sneaking—of pretending to sneak—is infinitesimal and divine. The bedroom lights are off. There’s a mountain of laundry needing to be sorted and folded that’s strewn across the bed, my bed, our bed, the bed I share with the bald man. The laundry makes me want to throw myself onto the rug and bang my fists against the floor until there are bruises. Instead, I burrow facedown into the pile of clean clothes and throw a quiet make-believe tantrum. This, too, offers a sliver of ecstasy. I am not alone in this house, but there is no one in the world who has any inkling about my immediate whereabouts and activities.

“Don’t let the cat out of the bag,” I say to myself in a gravelly voice.

“Joke’s on you,” myself says back. “There is no cat.”

Last night, when I finally came home from my sister’s, Bruce and his daughter were in the basement watching a show, and I embarked on a one-sided cold war in the kitchen. I ground the morning coffee beans, finished the dishes, put away a few of the heavier pots and pans, then started the dishwasher, which sometimes produces a loud whooshing sound through the pipes closest to the television’s speaker.

Later still, in bed, Bruce asked me how mad I was. “On a scale of one to five,” he said.

“Mad at you?” I asked.

“Yeah, how mad at me are you?”

I said, “Not mad at you. Mad at life.” I had to look away so he wouldn’t see me smile.

Even later, I pushed him onto his side and curled up behind him. In the morning, I informed him of my restlessness.

My mother texts, Can you please unlock your side door and let me in? Glass of wine?

I’m still upstairs, still buried in clean laundry, so Bruce beats me to the door. But I’m in the kitchen by the time he says to her, “One good fact: What insect produces milk more nutritious than a cow’s?”

She hands me a bottle of white wine. “Open that?” To Bruce, she says, “An insect?”

Bruce pulls out her regular chair—she lives a half mile from us—and says, “A roach!”

She says, “That’s vile. Your street looks like a parking lot for the Keeneland racetrack.” As of this morning, more than seventy people had RSVP’d for this kid’s party.

I hand the unopened bottle of wine to Bruce. He swaps it for one from our Sub-Zero. For the next thirty minutes I clean and chop vegetables while Bruce and my mother argue politics and Shakespeare. (My mother was once a high school English teacher.) We finish the bottle.

Last night, after pushing Bruce onto his side, I didn’t sleep. I concentrated on my pillow, which is foam and has two cutouts for either ear depending on which side I’m sleeping. It resembles the head of a hammerhead shark. Without the pillow, I get earaches. At first, we tried a mouth guard. By “we,” I mean my dentist and me. But this was also in the era of my ex. He and I had just moved to Kentucky. In Chicago, where we used to live and teach, the earaches had gotten so bad that there were tests, then X-rays, then MRIs. The Kentucky dentist was amused that no one in Chicago had considered a solution so simple as a mouth guard.

For the first few months, the months when my ex and I were our happiest, which preceded the months and then the years when we were our unhappiest, I’d wake up, having slept like a kid koala, only to realize I’d dislodged the bite guard sometime during the night. Mornings, I’d search the bedroom to find it. Sometimes it was under the bed, sometimes it was on the bathroom counter, sometimes it was between the mattress and the box spring, often it was under my pillow.

One night, I didn’t dislodge the mouth guard and that was the last time I’ve ever been able to sleep without wearing it. The earaches didn’t go away. Eventually my husband did.

About the time Bruce and I bought this jewel of a house, I discovered the online world of TMJ pillows.

My mother says, “You know how when you’re surfing the Web, you sometimes get a pop-up and the doctor in the ad asks if you want to cure your toe fungus?”

I sputter, and wine escapes my nose.

Bruce says, “What are you talking about?”

My mother says, “I’m going to have all my toenails removed.”

I leave the room, and Bruce, as I am making a note of my mother’s exchange on a legal pad, says, “You know she’s writing this down, right?”

My mother calls out, with real panic, “If you give me toe fungus, I will never forgive you. I will leave the Rolex to your sister.”

I walk back into the kitchen and give my mother a look to indicate that I have no idea what she’s talking about. My sister, with the sixth sense of a platypus, texts, I can see Mom’s car. Where are you guys???

Here are three things I am envious of—Jane’s sunlit entryway, her box beam ceilings, and the fact that there is no child in her life.

Bruce says, as I moodily clean up vegetable debris, “You’re milking your life’s lament.”

My mother says, “Oh, is she depressed?”

I say, “I guess I think I’m sad,” which is something one of Bruce’s students said, an expression that floored us both for its vulnerability. Now, a year later, we say it to each other as an inside joke. There are lots of inside jokes between us, sayings whose origins sometimes predate our status as a couple. Last week, what did I say as we accidentally ran the red light? I said, “We don’t have time to obey the law!” Bruce echoed me, laughing, then said, “What’s that from?” And I told him about my first boyfriend who once ran a stop sign on his way back to our apartment, and I said, out of nowhere, my voice a high-pitched cartoon, “We don’t have time to obey the law!” The phrase stuck. We used it together for six years. Maybe he and I share its custody.

My mother tells us she is looking for her soulmate. Or someone to take her for a glass of wine.

“We’ll drink with you anytime,” Bruce assures her. “Have wine with us.”

“Yes,” my mother says mildly. “But you drink in sweatpants. I’d like someone to get fancy for.” Currently, she has three boyfriends, but they are all online, and they are all in different states.

The ski instructor is pushy, she says, and I encourage her to cut him off. To the retired army man she texts a photo of the bottle of Haut-Médoc Bruce opened. His reply is instant: I don’t like Medoc. I encourage her to cut him off, too. There is also a Canadian, but my mother says little about him, and I haven’t yet asked.

My father is also looking for his soulmate. He placed his ad in the newspaper, print edition, old-school style: Adventurous Tall Dapper Gentleman Seeks a female companion. My father was proud of the ad and shared it with me eagerly. I shared it with my brother, who was intrigued by his approach to capitalization. I noted that “female companion”—the ostensible purpose behind the ad—hadn’t measured up.

My mother remarried first. When she finally introduced us to the man—dinner at a restaurant—he opened his mouth to reveal a chunk of bright orange cheese he’d pressed against his tongue. The second time we met him—lunch at the same restaurant—my mother told us they were getting married. I was eight. He had thinning blond hair and was overweight. His younger sister had been the first Jewish debutante in Atlanta. I was skeptical that this doughy man with a penchant for soft cheese could have anything to do with a debutante, much less with my mother.

The man who would become my stepfather hated two things: people who hated Jews and the fact that he was Jewish. “Jewish by birth,” he’d say to me when I was older, “atheist by the grace of god.” He’d been married once before. They’d had no children. He didn’t drink. I met his father on a handful of occasions. He’d been an extra in Driving Miss Daisy and before that, in real life, an important and prominent lawyer. He’d had several wives. He was a man who didn’t especially like children. By the time I met my stepfather’s father, he was already dying of cancer. From my stepfather I learned to be observant and dismissive, cynical and dishonest.

I am not looking for my soulmate, in part because I have Bruce and in part because I disagree with the category, akin as it is to vampires or talking kittens, both of which are favorite subjects of my undergrads every fall. I regularly assure Bruce that I am like neither of my parents. When he is gone (as in dead), I will not be looking for someone to replace him. “You’re it,” I like to say. “Never again after you.”

“Please stop imagining your life when I’m dead,” he says to me, and so I do not tell him of all the improvements I make each night as I lie awake in bed next to him and fantasize about my life in our house alone. I do not tell him about the plunge pool or the mudroom or the tile roof or the slate-floored entryway. I certainly do not tell him about the Saarinen table in Verde Alpi or the Wishbone chairs he’d find so uncomfortable.

I do not tell him of all the improvements I make each night as I lie awake in bed next to him and fantasize about my life in our house alone.

Also, there is Theo, the mailman, on whom I’ve developed a crush in the three years since Bruce and I have lived together. I could say it is a platonic crush, but that would be wrong and serve only the purpose of protecting Bruce’s feelings, and he is perfectly aware of my own toward the mailman.

Theo is somewhere between six and a half and seven feet tall. He is Black and has a beautiful bald head. There is another mailman, Oscar, who is also Black, also bald, and classically more beautiful than Theo. But Oscar is not my crush. It is not Oscar who honks the horn of the U.S. mail van and waves at me when he sees me running and far from home. It is not Oscar who compliments the smell of my cooking as he wedges the day’s catalogues into the mail slot. It is Theo.

Last month, while I was replacing a hinge on the front door, Theo stopped to admire my handiwork. “Damn, girl,” he said, shaking his head. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

It is hard not to consider Theo.

Bruce and I didn’t have sex last night. I was tired. Also, I was mad.

Now I show my sister’s plea for our company to my mother and Bruce.

He says, “When my daughter was little, there weren’t random family members hanging around at the birthday parties.”

My mother says, “Speak it, Othello.”

I go upstairs to tell the eleven-year-old, who’s reading a book while sitting up in bed, that we’re heading to my sister’s. “You look like Alice James,” I say.

She primly tucks an edge of blanket under her thigh. “I resemble that remark,” she says.

Sometimes, offhandedly when talking to her friends, the eleven-year-old will refer to me as one of her parents. Sometimes, to my face, she’ll flat-out call me her stepmother, and I will remember all over again how wrong I was to imagine that marriage has anything to do with the love a child feels toward a grown-up. At the same time, I will look at her with absolute dread, worrying at her large and open heart, wondering at her capacity for and willingness to be vulnerable. When I was her age, I locked myself in the bathroom because I didn’t want to go to the court-mandated psychiatrist. I tore lines in my skin with a ballpoint pen to distract myself from the headaches I got from crying so hard. I kept a packed bag of my favorite stuffed animals shoved under my bed—one at my mother’s house and one at my father’s—ready to be grabbed in case of a fire or a pop-up kidnapping or the eventual and unavoidable arrival of the evil thing I knew with unreserved certainty was lurking, at all times, just around the corner.

Attendance for the eleven-year-old is optional, so we leave her to her voluntary bed rest, and my mother, Bruce, and I walk across the street. My father spots us immediately and pulls me in for a hug. Now my face smells like Polo.

He says, “Your sister reinvented motherhood. You look terrific, kid.”

Next he grabs my mother by her upper arm. He says her name. He says, “How are you, girl? You’re a sight. You working out?”

If she wasn’t already intending to wash that sweater tonight, she is now. Not because she thinks my father has cooties or anything. It’s the Polo. My father buys the stuff by the gallon. That isn’t a joke. Just like it isn’t a joke that my father installed a full-size fiberglass bathtub inside the shower stall at his apartment, which is a rental. It’s an exact replica of my bathtub. If I’d known he was going to buy one and put it in his bathroom, I would have offered him mine for free. Except for watering the upstairs and attic plants, we never use it.

My father also lives a half mile from us, but in the direction opposite my mother.

Nodding at Bruce, he says, “How’s your roommate?” My father has called every man I’ve ever lived with, including my ex-husband, my roommate.

I would like not to be bothered by the news of my ex’s debut. I would like for Bruce not to have looked over my shoulder this morning only to find me reading an early review. I would like for him not to have said, “You’re obsessed,” and I would like for the obsession not to be true.

In my ex’s book, the ex-wife character is a commercial hack of whom he and his more intellectual friends make much fun. In his book, I am wildly successful and dull.

Someone has put a glass of cider in my hand. (Cider is the family business; as in, my brother-in-law makes cider for a living.) My nephew sideswipes me. The cider sloshes but recovers. He runs the length of the yard, then hurls himself against the bounce house. There are squeals. He’s dressed as a police officer—baton and hat and everything. My nephew is beautiful and blond. I have thoughts about his costume. His little brothers are dressed up the same way.

I whisper to Bruce, “Am I high or are a bunch of the kids dressed as cops, not just my nephews?”

He says, “You might be high. That might be one of your little secrets. But there are, separately, at least a dozen officers.”

I say, “Is that weird?”

He says, “It isn’t Halloween.”

I say, “Am I high or are my nephews’ costumes really well-made while the other kids’ costumes look like they’ll ignite in direct sunlight?”

Bruce says, “I’m beginning to think you actually are high, but if you’re trying to figure out whether or not your sister shelled out extra money—”

My mother interrupts: “Does anyone want my cider?”

There was a time, just after Bruce and I bought our house and began living together for the first time, when I wouldn’t have sex with him if his daughter was home. Not even if she was fast asleep in her bedroom with its door closed and we were in our bedroom with its door closed and it was three in the morning. I would not have sex. Her proximity inhibited my ability to move outside myself, which is something I need to do to enjoy sex, and I enjoy enjoying sex.

By “move outside myself,” I mean to not be aware of or in contact with the version of me who chops vegetables or folds clothes or bakes bread or pays bills. I do not like to be “Woman making love with Man because he is the Man she loves and on whom she can depend.” I prefer to be “Body having sex with Body that happens to fit well and please well and anticipate well and tease well, this wellness having been established over years of satisfying practice.” Hearing myself think these things, I am dumbfounded by the fact that I was ever married.

When we fight—which isn’t often—if I cry, I always tell Bruce to ignore the tears. “That’s not me,” I say. “That’s just society’s conditioning.”

And he says, “It’s okay to have emotions.”

And I say, “Please don’t use that word with me.”

I am like this—willful, stubborn, withholding—until there is a morning like this morning. Suddenly, I announce my lament. I am deadpan and dry-eyed. It’s astonishing there are two sets of binoculars.

A chintzily dressed officer rushes past and shouts to another kid, not dressed as anything, “I told you there was no piñata!”

It’s true: I am a little high. I wanted to tell Jane, but I didn’t want her to judge me. In general, I don’t get high, but I recently ordered some gummies advertised on Bon Appétit’s website. I thought the gummies sounded useful—tiny sugary pathways with expensive flavor profiles that might lead me out of myself for a few hours here and there.

The gummies, just as Bruce suspected, are in fact one of my petite private confidences, though I won’t ever admit it and he’ll never know, since I have a credit card set aside for just these trifling purposes. He does know about the credit card. Our finances are combined. My one request was that we never get married. His one request was that we join our accounts. All this to say, we’re knotted together as good as the next couple. But I like it that I can say to the eleven-year-old’s Kentucky-raised friends that her father and I aren’t married. So far, not one of them has cared. One day, I comfort myself, someone will surely be bothered, and it will be as spectacular as the sunlight across Jane’s entryway rug.

Wag the dog, I tell my freshmen, is an image that houses an idea. Irrelevant circumstances are dictating our actions is an idea without an image. Give me images, I tell them. They give me images by way of clichés—as in, My mother’s love was a gift. I say, yes, an image, readers love images, but can you make the image your own? They describe the gift’s wrapping paper. Better, I say. Still wrong, but better.

One book review goes into some detail about a plot point in which my ex lets an undergrad teach his class so he can have sex with his mistress. Knowing my ex, this likely happened. I bet he wrote the scene well. I wish I could read it without reading the book. I wish I could move it outside itself. I wish I could divorce it. I’m not trying to be punny. This is my brain on drugs.

I know a poet who wrote a beautiful book about her divorce. In the book, she asks herself something along the lines of, “What if I’d been watching the relationship instead of living in it?” I read that question and gasped. I said aloud to no one, “What if I had been in my marriage instead of watching it?” Then I clasped a hand over my mouth and felt very scared.

The bounce house is shaped like a castle. Because Bruce and I are fundamentally flawed people with big hearts, we have both done quick Google searches on how much my sister and her husband are paying for this party. We don’t yet know about the mutual googling, but later, lying in bed, the lights out, each of us separately wondering about sex—me: too tired? not too tired? interested? penis? him: sex sex sex sex sex boob boob boob boob—we will admit to having earlier in the day stepped away from the party to find the number. Maybe I go first, maybe he does. But our research renders matching results: in the state of Kentucky, four hours costs ninety dollars; for 20 percent more, you get the whole day; or, tack on 60 percent and you can make a night of it. I love the use of percentages in lieu of hard-and-fast prices.

There’s something going on at this party with all these cop uniforms that isn’t right.

“Old lady, push me,” says a neighbor boy to someone’s grandmother. I scan the crowd for the kid’s father. It takes me a few minutes to locate him because I’ve been looking in the wrong place. I’ve been looking for him anywhere not within hearing distance of his kid. Instead, he’s leaning against the swing set. He’s right there. The kid says it again: “Old lady.” The father hears. I can see that he hears even if his face registers nothing. (I know a thing or two about faces registering nothing.) I am seconds away from diving onto the lawn, pulling up grass by the fistful, shouting, I know you can hear him. I know you can hear him. Why won’t you do something? when Bruce edges near me and says, “There’s a lid for every pot.” He gestures with his chin in the direction of the alcohol tubs, where my father has cornered my mother.

My father, a tall man, is wearing his large-brim, custom-made cowboy hat, a white turtleneck, and a yellow bandana.

“That,” I say to Bruce, “is an image that contains a thought.”

He says, “I want to strangle that kid on the swing.”

This conversation must have happened earlier or later, because here is where my mother, smelling distinctly of Polo cologne, breaks in with her unwanted cider and says to Bruce, “I looked it up. Only one type of roach gives live birth and nurses her offspring.” To me, she says, “You look green.”

It must be the gummies. I say, “Roach milk makes me want to barf.”

She says, “Doesn’t everything make you want to barf?”

“Ouch,” I say. She is referring to my decades-long eating disorder. Think of it as an inside joke between two women who know and love each other to excess.

“Oh, is she feeling ill?” my mother sings in a halting falsetto. “Her face is eau de Nil!”

“What’s that from?” I ask.

“Word of the day,” she says. “Bruce turned me on to it.”

Bruce, pointing at my sister’s neighbor’s chimney, says, “That’s an adverse possession.”

I ask him what he’s talking about and if he’d know such a term if his ex-wife weren’t a tax attorney. He explains that the chimney is on my sister’s property but obviously belongs to her neighbor.

“So, whose adverse possession is it? My sister’s or the neighbor’s?”

He says, “The neighbor’s.”

I say, “Huh.” Then I add, “There’s a metaphor there.”

We drink more cider and watch the officers attack one another with plastic batons, which are leaving visible welts.

Toward midnight, while Bruce and I are in bed, possibly having had sex, possibly not, my phone lights up.

Bruce says, “Must be your boyfriend.”

I unlock the screen. My sister has written, R u ok?

I write, What kind of question is that?

She writes, Yr face looks sad.

I write, YOU CAN SEE ME?

Our blinds are pulled; our lights are off.

She writes, At the party, your face looked sad . . .

I write, Not sad, just high!

She writes, Fun!

Then she writes, Cocktails soon?

I thumbs-up the invite, then screenshot the exchange and send it to Jane.

In the middle of the night, Bruce jostles me awake.

“Who are you?” he asks.

I tell him I am me. But my mouth is still asleep, and so I hand him the thought with my mind. He does not hear me.

“Who are you?” he asks again.

There is a ten-year age difference between us, but it is too early for early onset.

“If I’m Bruce,” he says into my ear, “who are you? What’s your name?”

A motorcycle thumps down our street, its single cylinder pulsing into the late-night air. We listen as it passes.

“I’m Angela,” I murmur. “He named me Angela.”

“Angela,” he repeats quietly. His daughter is asleep in a bedroom down the hall. “My wife, Angela.” In his voice, there is a funny suggestion of relief.

Bruce squeezes my thigh once, then turns away from me and onto his side, pulling most of the blankets with him. Within minutes, his breathing relaxes. His shoulder rises and falls in rhythm with his breath. He leaves me awake and alone with my thoughts. I slip out of bed and tiptoe down the stairs.

I creep along the walls of our home, moving back and forth between rooms. I avoid the windows, stay in the shadows. I am terrified by my own silence, by the distance I can travel in this dark house without making a single sound. I imagine myself sleeping in the room above me. I imagine my boyfriend beside me. At the end of the hall is his daughter. We are so vulnerable up there—our sound machines purring, our fans whirring—all of us unknowing. I creep and pretend to be someone else, someone sinister, someone out to invade a home for no purpose at all except that I can.

Who am I?

I am a reluctant stepmother.

I am a selfish sister.

I am a very private person.

I am addicted to transparency.

I am frightened by infants.

I live the majority of my life in my head.

I want to confess.

I am trying to confess, but there are so many secrets.

Writers, especially of autofiction, experience relationships differently. When someone’s primary lens of looking through the world is seeking stories and dilemmas and personalities to dissect on paper, I really don’t know how secure their interpersonal relationships must feel.

I’m also not trying to exclude anyone with the term “writers.” Everyone has a little bit of this weird gene in them, I’m sure. Maybe it’s the part of you that reaches to rant about your cheating ex on your Instagram Close Friends story or post a TikTok singing a song that vaguely connects to how you’re feeling about your ex-best friend. Maybe you write in your diary extensively or just really loved telling your mom about high school drama.

But autofictional novel writers like Hannah Pittard must have this instinct in spades.

“If You Love It, Let It Kill You” follows a self-inserted version of its author, Hannah Pittard, in the aftermath of her ex-husband releasing a book which contains yet another pseudo-version of her — something that is only slightly altered from real events. The character, cleverly concealed as “Hana,” spirals a bit, grappling with the fact that, not only is she in the novel, but she is also murdered in his story. This situation must be awful for her. Right?

Pittard pulls you in a few different directions with this book: There’s a talking cat that only she can hear, dubious interpersonal ethics and the struggle of finding yourself living a life you’re positive you never wanted. After Hana’s ex-husband moved their lives to Kentucky and cheated on her with her best friend, Hana found quite a different life from the one she had started with. Still a university professor, she also has been in a long-term relationship with a man and a pseudo stepmother toward his young daughter, a concept she rejects, along with the idea of getting remarried, throughout the novel.

The book’s title seems to imply that she finds peace with her arrangement: Even if it’s killing you that your life is not how you wanted it to be, you love it — so suffer. But, by the end of the novel, I’m still not quite sure. The baggage that lurks under the surface of Hana’s experience doesn’t attempt to conceal itself. Pittard doesn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed about her part in any of this, about the intricate emotions that come with writing about people she knows or the infidelity she reveals that Hana took part in before her ex-husband came clean about his affair. The final chapter of the novel leaves her self-inserted character gratified and triumphant with the realization that those in your life are kind of there to be written about. Her use of these barely altered real-life events, meta rumination and complete absence of desire to separate herself, the author, from the origins of the novel is a little unnerving.

There’s a beabadoobee song, “This is How it Went,” timidly thrown onto the end of her album This is How Tomorrow Moves. The song was written after a friend of hers posted a picture with Bea’s ex-boyfriend to the song Bea had written about their breakup.

“Let me write a song like all the songs I love to listen to / Writing ’cause I’m healing, never writing songs to hurt you / Using what I’m best at and I hope you do the same.”

Something similar occurs in “If You Love it, Let It Kill You” where one of the characters throws an icy remark about fiction writers always mining their lives for their work. Songwriters perhaps get equal, if not more flack for this. The pure volume of people not only speculating about who Taylor Swift’s songs are about, but also criticizing her for writing about real people, should speak for itself. But it’s hard to pinpoint when things are taken too far. Beabadoobee’s song, timid and shy as her delivery is, helps to build some empathy for her. She acknowledges that the person she is singing about can express their emotions about the event, and that her intention in writing the song was not revenge. There’s a sense that she has thought about her actions and how they would make those involved feel. It’s a sympathy that allows her to reach from the contemplative, fictional mode of the song to forgiveness in real life. I don’t know if Pittard and “If You Love It, Let It Kill You” can argue the same.

The book is abrasive in its references to her life, directly telling the audience that she’ll refer to her current boyfriend as Bruce, because it’s the name her ex used in his book. (It’s also the name that Pittard’s real-life ex uses in his story about her, a story called “Halloween” published in 2019). She grapples with the romantic encounter she had before her divorce, a man who calls her “Hot Stuff,” which is also the name of a novel Pittard wrote but never published. There’s a trail of easter eggs that become shockingly obvious after even just a skim of the Vulture article chronicling Pittard and the other authors involved. It’s shocking, it’s invasive and at times it can feel cruel.

Despite the plot of Pittard’s latest novel being heavily intertwined with real life, and self-aware in its presentation, it’s not really self-aware about the moral dilemma that has slipped between every line. You can’t help but wonder how Pittard’s ex feels about this book, how the people in her life are okay with her writing about them in such a vitriolic tone. Pittard is entirely uninterested in how much someone else’s perspective matters, or how fickle the truth is. In fact, the news of her ex-husband’s novel fades into the background, serving more as a set dressing for the main character’s slow unraveling of her old life and developing discontent with her new one. Pittard’s novel becomes more of an ode to art itself, the unwavering worship for what is being produced, a respect that seems to trump all other considerations — as long as the art is good. She reveals this respect in the same Vulture interview:

“I would love for young people everywhere to get to experience art and conversation in this way … I’d rather be a character in somebody else’s book than not acknowledged at all.”

It’s this respect that Pittard lionizes at the end of “If You Love It, Let It Kill You.” Her main character emerges from the confusing aftermath of her ex-husband’s book announcement, deciding that it’s worth it to suffer the blows after all, as long as there’s an interesting story to tell.

Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.

New York Magazine’s entertainment site Vulture sank its claws into the unfolding melodrama last summer with a piece that ran a fine-toothed comb through the controversy. Chris Heath’s article “Four Friends, Two Marriages, One Affair — and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It” compares the published versions of this saga with the real-life story. The parallels leave the reader staring down a hallway of self-referential mirrors that will seemingly never end — especially when Heath throws into the mix a short story Ewell published in JuxtaProse Magazine in summer 2019.

In Ewell’s “Halloween,” the ex-wife character is a professor named Angela who is killed. In Pittard’s “If You Love It, Let It Kill You,” Hana is triggered upon learning the protagonist in her ex-husband’s book (also named Angela) is “knifed by a homeless man.” As she meanders from teaching creative-writing seminars at a university in Kentucky to tangling with a vivacious cast of offbeat family members, Hana’s grasp on her mental health starts to unravel.

Credit: Mothwing Photography Credit: Mothwing Photography

While knowledge of Pittard and Ewell’s backstory adds a titillating element to this tale, to focus solely on the “he said, she said” aspect of this saga is to pay a disservice to the actual work Pittard has produced. Through a thick haze of generational ennui and aching self-reflection, “If You Love It, Let It Kill You” demonstrates that it doesn’t matter what Pittard is writing about — she is mighty skilled at drilling to the heart of uncomfortable emotions.

The novel opens with a conversation between Hana and her friend Jane, a fellow professor who takes on the role of Hana’s conscience. Jane is one of a few figures Hana uses to measure her normalcy, or lack thereof, as she grapples with living a conventional life while fantasizing about unconventional things.

Hana struggles with the concept of family and claims she wants nothing to do with it. She lives with her boyfriend Bruce and his 11-year-old daughter (who also exists in both the real and fictionalized versions of this story). Wanting to keep her relationship with Bruce “weird,” Hana won’t marry him. And she is miffed that her ex had the nerve to proceed with her character’s nuptials in his narrative.

Shunning the role of stepmother, Hana’s goal is to “exist merely as the eccentric childless girlfriend who happened to own 50% of a house with the child’s father.” Bruce’s daughter, however, is fond of her dad’s partner and views Hana as “basically my mom.”

Compounding the conflict is the proximity of her other family members who have followed Hana to Lexington. Hana’s sister lives across the street with her small children, and her assimilation into domesticity irritates Hana.

Hana’s divorced parents each live a mile away — in opposite directions — and are the original source of her melancholy. Despite delivering an abundance of comic relief, Mom and Dad remain a pervasive cause of her present-day dissatisfaction. Hana revisits her childhood throughout the narrative as her despair grows, prompting her to sum up her formative years as being “raised in the ’80s by a pack of rabid wolves.”

As unhappy people often do, Hana distracts herself from her pain by borrowing trouble. One disturbing plotline involves an injured cat who is trapped in her garage. Hana simultaneously refuses to return the cat to its owner while failing to procure medical treatment for its injuries.

Hana and the cat delve into some fascinating “conversations” about the chaos rippling through her life. But the lack of empathy Hana shows a sentient creature contradicts her claim to be “a savior of animals of all kind.” Ultimately, the cat storyline reinforces one of Pittard’s overarching themes: Humans are selfish and will usually disappoint.

As in the previous installments of this saga, infidelity is under scrutiny. This time, Pittard puts her own character on blast as she revisits Hana’s frustrating entanglements with men past and present. When she drops a scintillating bomb about her marriage, readers are left with plenty to speculate about concerning the truth buried in her autofiction.

Bestselling author and memoirist Anne Lamott famously said, “If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Hannah Pittard ran with that sentiment in “If You Love It, Let It Kill You” and no one is safe, including herself. That honesty is what makes this raw and self-referential story such an engrossing read.

An earlier version of this review mistakenly attributed details from Andrew Ewell’s short story “Halloween” to his novel “Set For Life.”

FICTION

“If You Love It, Let It Kill You”

by Hannah Pittard

Henry Holt

224 pages, $28.99