First Love is here!

Today’s the day! First Love: Essays on Friendship is officially available wherever books are sold. (The audiobook, which I narrated, is also available today!)

Thank you so much to everyone who has preordered, posted, and otherwise supported First Love along the way. Feeling other people’s excitement about the book has been the only thing that has felt like a real counterbalance to my nervousness about putting something I care so much about into the world, and waiting to see how it will be received.

It may not have looked like it, since this book is arriving exactly three years after my debut, but First Love has been a long time in the making. I first had the idea to write a collection of essays about how much I love my friends about nine years ago, when I was still struggling with the narrative structure of Negative Space and dreaming, as you do, of the next project.

When I finally sold Negative Space, I excitedly shifted focus to writing a book proposal for what I was then referring to as The Book of Sisters—at the time intended to be a collection of purely personal narrative essays, each one telling the story of a different friendship in my life. But then that first book deal for Negative Space fell through (that’s a long story… I wrote about it for Electric Literature), and The Book of Sisters went into the proverbial drawer.

It was another three years before Negative Space was selected as a winner of SFWP’s annual contest, and another year of edits and production after that before I could finally return to the project that, by this point, I’d been dreaming of and itching to write for more than five years. But right on the heels of putting out a very vulnerable memoir, feeling very exposed, I no longer wanted to write purely personal essays. Now I wanted to look outward at the world, using friendship to talk about all kinds of things that are interesting to me—from what “mothering” really means to the posthumous work of Sylvia Plath and the ethics of true crime. And so The Book of Sisters was reborn as First Love. (For what it’s worth… this one ended up being just as vulnerable and exposing.)

My wonderful agent and I worked on the proposal for about a year, and went out on submission just a couple of months after Negative Space came out.

And now almost three years after that, here she is.

Would you please help me celebrate the arrival of First Love by spreading the word?

Post the cover or a link, or a photo if you have a copy! Tell your friends! Tell your mom!

Here’s a great link to share: https://bookshop.org/a/1925/9780593447574 (that’s my Bookshop affiliate link, so I earn a small commission on it…)

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If your copy hasn’t arrived yet, here are a couple of excerpts to hold you over:

• “On Murder Memoirs” at Slate, about the book I chose not to write, and about the impossible challenge of writing about a murder victim without letting their death overshadow their life.

• “Reading Sylvia Plath and My Dead Friend’s Instagram” at Salon, about the aesthetics and romanticization of sadness, why it’s so alluring, and what it can cost.

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And if you received and early copy and have already read the book (and if you liked it…), this is the part of the process at which reviews in places like Amazon and Goodreads become hugely important. So if you feel so inclined to leave a review, I would so appreciate that, too. (It doesn’t have to be long or involved at all, just a sentence and a (high) star rating will do the trick!) (Gah putting a book out sure involves asking for a lot of favors. Thank you for putting up with me.)

Thank you also to everyone who came out for the launch last night at Books Are Magic! It was a truly special experience, and I can’t wait to hit the road for more events in the coming weeks (and I hope to see you there!):

Mon 5/13, NYC: Franklin Park Reading Series

Weds 5/15, Los Angeles: Skylight Books, in conversation with Ruth Madievsky

Thurs 5/16, San Francisco: The Booksmith, in conversation with Esmé Weijun Wang

Mon 5/20, Seattle: Elliott Bay Books, in conversation with Jane Wong

Tues 5/21, Portland: Powell’s City of Books, in conversation with Erica Berry

Weds, 6/5, Providence: Riffraff Bookstore

Thurs, 6/6, NYC: Book Club Bar with Chloé Caldwell

Tues 6/11, Philadelphia: Head House Books, in conversation with Athena Dixon