We Do What We Do in the Dark
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"Hart’s novel does something exceptional that few pieces of fiction have done successfully….[H]as flashes of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends." – New York Times
“An unforgettable account of a forbidden romance.” – Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy
“Moving and memorable.” – Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion
“Sensual and wise.” – Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
A novel about a young woman’s life-altering affair with a much older, married woman.
Mallory is a freshman in college when she meets the woman. She sees her for the first time at the university’s gym, immediately entranced by this elegant, older person, whom she later learns is married and works at the school. Before long, they begin a clandestine affair. Self-possessed, successful, brilliant, and aloof, the woman absolutely consumes Mallory, who is still reeling from her mother’s death a few months earlier. Mallory retreats from the rest of the world and into a relationship with this melancholy, elusive woman she admires so much yet who can never be fully hers, solidifying a sense of solitude that has both haunted and soothed her as long as she can remember.
Years after the affair has ended, Mallory must decide whether to stay safely in this isolation, this constructed loneliness, or to step fully into the world and confront what the woman meant to her, for better or worse. This simmering, unsettling debut novel reveals the consequences of desire and influence, portraying two women whose lives have been transformed by love, loss, and secrecy.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Loneliness, desire, and the elusive edges of identity simmer in this quietly devastating coming-of-age story. Mallory is a college freshman still raw from her mother’s death when she falls into a secret relationship with a much older, married female professor at the school. What begins as fascination deepens into obsession, shaping Mallory’s inner life for years to come. As she drifts through early adulthood, haunted by what she can’t quite name, we’re pulled into a story about the dangers of a love that has to hide in the dark. Hypnotic and emotionally precise, Michelle Hart’s prose captures the aching weight of longing with haunting clarity. The restrained structure and intimate scope sometimes feel like a confession whispered through a closed door. This brief but powerful read lingers long after it ends, tracing the shape of a life forever altered by a single entanglement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hart debuts with a transfixing queer coming-of-age novel about a woman's affair with a much older professor. Mallory Green is in her first year at a college on Long Island shortly after her mother's death from cancer in 2008. There, she becomes fixated on a never-named woman who teaches children's literature. The professor, who is brusque but encouraging in their conversations, invites Mallory over for dinner. Her husband is away, and she makes plain her own attraction to Mallory. Despite feeling "embarrassed, as if she'd written an intense journal entry that she now had to read aloud," Mallory plunges into an affair with her. The woman ends it when her professor husband returns at the end of the semester, leaving Mallory floundering as she attempts to date a male student and later drifts through postgraduation life in New York City. A flashback to Mallory's youth traces her close friendship with a neighbor girl, saturated with frustrated desire. The professor's reappearance four years after graduation, just as Mallory is settling into a new relationship, opens old wounds. Mallory's intense interiority and self-consciousness will remind readers of Sally Rooney's work, and Hart's prose is delicate and piercing. This is auspicious and breathtaking.
