Alex

The humorous and relatable chronicle of a young woman’s obsessive and romantically unrequited crush, in which the sex scenes are replaced by endnotes written as rhymed sonnets.

Six months after graduating from a small liberal arts college, Willa receives a text from Alex, her situationship from senior year. What would it mean to reply? What would it mean to not reply? To understand what makes a woman act, again and again, against her better judgment, Willa begins a postmortem of their non-relationship. Her working hypothesis: She did it for the plot.

“For centuries, women in novels had been making fools of themselves for the sake of good sex,” Willa writes. But for her, it was the other way around. She’d pursued Alex in order to make a fool of herself. To feel like a character in a book. The sex itself was secondary: an endnote, separate from and simultaneous to the plot of her life.

What begins as a comic novel of one woman’s inability to let go of a crush develops into a forthright ode to youth, queer desire, and friendship. In clean, playful prose, Alex tells a story about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the ridiculous ways we’ve acted in the past.