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Join us for this “gorgeous, electric” collection of short stories is about the inner lives of young women during their transformative twenties, navigating relationships, nostalgia for the past, and the uncertainty of the future (Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean House).
With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In “That Is Shocking,” a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote” and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world.
Written with crystalline prose and sly humor, the stories in I Meant It Once build to complete a profoundly recognizable portrait of early adulthood and the ways in which seemingly incidental moments can come to define the stories we tell ourselves. For fans of Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, and Melissa Bank, these stories about being young and adrift in today’s world go down easy and pack a big punch.
Kate Doyle’s short stories have been published in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Split Lip, Wigleaf, and other publications. Originally from New England, she is a former bookseller and a 2021 A Public Space Writing Fellow. She has lived in New York City, Amsterdam, and Ithaca, NY.
Tess Gunty is a novelist based who grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and now lives in Los Angeles. Her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, and the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. It was named one of twelve Essential Reads by The New Yorker, and a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, People, TIME, Oprah Daily, LitHub, The Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus. The novel has been optioned for film rights by Fremantle and producer Richard Brown. Tess holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. She studied English with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Granta, LitHub, Joyland, Freeman’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash, and elsewhere.
