The Maidenheads

Jamie is bad at endings, which is why she’s stuck at a dead-end newspaper job, continuing to have break-up sex with her first-ever hetero partner, and haunted by the what-ifs of her ex-girlfriend Mari—a charismatic and brilliant musician—and their former band together, the Maidenheads. Since they (and their band) broke up a decade ago, Jamie hasn’t been able to sing.

Then an unexpected opportunity to perform in DC with Mari’s successful new band arises, and Jamie jumps at it. What begins as a return to music becomes a reckoning—with the weight of unfinished love, the voice she has long kept buried, and her own complicated past. But as Jamie channels more of her energy into the band, other threads in her life begin to fray, and she must make some urgent choices about her future.

Electric, spine-tingling and filled to the brim with tenderness and honesty, The Maidenheads is a novel about the tenacity of first love, the life-changing power of music and the difficult, necessary work of becoming yourself.

Benny B. Peterson (they/them) is a writer and editor based near Washington, DC. A contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine, they have also worked at Foreign Policy, the New Republic, and Street Sense, DC’s street newspaper. They have written about culture, politics, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues for The New York Times, Washington Post, Elle, Slate and The Atlantic, among others, and received an MFA in fiction from Bennington.