True Love
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Glamour Best Book of 2020 • A Bustle Best Books of 2020 • Winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award • An Entertainment Weekly 30 Hottest Book of the Summer • A Refinery29 25 Book You’ll Want To Read This Summer Selection • A Chicago Review of Books 10 Must-Read Books of the Month • A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Shondaland 15 Hot Books for Summer
One of today’s most provocative literary writers—the author of the critically-acclaimed Sunshine State and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Binary Star—captures the confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a dark comedy about a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump.
Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it.
From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable “relationship” in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus.
Nina’s quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human—a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in an era defined by detachment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gossip, sexual desire, and the uncompromising economics for aspiring artists guide the action in Gerard's lurid, captivating tale (after the essay collection Sunshine State). Nina Wicks, a 20-something writer with an eating disorder and pill addiction who dropped out of college in New York City, is back home on the Florida Gulf Coast, dating a pretentious artist named Seth while sexting with her magazine editor, Brian, and talking on the phone with her best friend, Odessa, about an attempt to reconnect with her emotionally distant mother. Nina and Seth move to Brooklyn for her to begin a writing program, and she finds a low-paying gig that affords her a space to write. After Nina reconnects with Aaron, an acquaintance from college, they discuss making a movie titled True Love, and their volatile attraction leads to her dizzying breakup with Seth and harrowing fights between Nina and Aaron, which reach a fever pitch after Nina becomes the victim of revenge porn from Brian. Aaron's movie idea ("a series of ill-conceived relationships that flame out in humiliating ways") partially describes the book, but Nina's defiance against labels and mansplaining as she works through her pain on her own terms adds an arresting feminist layer. Gerard's unflinching look at youthful desperation marks an exciting turn in her work.
