meet the girl
There’s a point I’m writing I’m the Girl where I start waking up after two or three hours of sleep—because that’s all the sleep I’m getting while I’m writing I’m the Girl—with my heart in my throat and scratches all over my face. The first time I look in the mirror and discover the little red lines on my forehead and cheeks, I don’t understand it as something I’m doing to myself. But I learn. It’s the manuscript. It’s the deadline. It’s a tunnel. Finishing a book usually feels like a way out, but this one feels like it’s putting me in the path of an oncoming train. My computer is full of the bleakest shit. I read and watch things that make me angry, sick. At night, I stare into the dark with my fists clenched.
My 8th novel is finished, I write, when it’s finally done. The promise I make to destroy you always starts as the contract I enter to destroy myself. And I am destroyed. I’m the Girl is sent out for first reads. I’m told it’s brilliant, and it is. And here are the challenges. Because there are challenges, when you decide to write a book like this. But I know all about the challenges. Have you seen my face. I talk to a friend and we figure it out, why I keep insisting on doing this to myself: it hurts to write these stories. It hurts more to turn away.
In 2008, Cracked Up to Be’s first trade review calls it “forgettable fodder for insatiable readers of Gossip Girl [. . .] bound to leave teens who like a little more lit in their chick lit cold.” It’s that line, how it makes a point of dismissing the readers—the girls—who might see themselves in Parker’s story that digs into me the most. So I dig in too: Regina. Eddie. Sloane. Romy. Sadie. They’re not the only ones I see. How about West McCray on the radio. Girls go missing all the time. Restless teenage girls, reckless teenage girls. Teenage girls and their inevitable drama. I see those cruel dismissals, those people who turn away. It’s a privilege to be able to turn away.
Look:
In 2018, Electric Literature calls me “a master of the bitch” for years of writing “nuanced, wrenching stories” about angry and unlikable girls. My boundary-pushing approach to female-led narratives stems from a commitment to exploring the brutal realities young women face by taking their voices seriously—and without apology.
This has never been truer than with I’m the Girl, releasing September 13th, 2022, from Wednesday Books.
When sixteen-year-old Georgia Avis discovers the brutalized dead body of thirteen-year-old Ashley James, she teams up with Ashley’s older sister, Nora, to find and bring the killer to justice before he strikes again. But their investigation throws Georgia into a world of unimaginable privilege and wealth, without conscience or consequence, and as Ashley’s killer closes in, Georgia will discover when money, power, and beauty rule, it might not be a matter of who is guilty—but who is guiltiest.
I’m the Girl is an emotionally charged, coming-of-age thriller about the machinations and manipulations of a power structure determined to maintain its hold at the expense of everything and everyone, told through the deeply intimate and unfiltered perspective of a sixteen-year-old lesbian. It’s a bold and unflinching account of how one girl feels in her body and how she experiences the world. It breaks new ground in the questions it’s not afraid to ask about a culture that doesn’t care whether or not young women live or die.
It’s a spiritual successor to Sadie, taking place in the same universe, with a little reference that ties both books together thematically. Like Sadie, I’m the Girl is a crossover read that holds nothing back in the way it shines a light on the darkest parts of human nature, in hopes it will inspire the best of our own.
Its cover is the result of the combined talents of Wednesday Books designer Kerri Resnick and illustrator Kemi Mai. When I told Kerri I’m the Girl examined different expressions of sexual predation and violence, she came back with this incredibly thoughtful and utterly inspired design. Kemi’s stunning and confronting portrait captures Georgia, a girl who believes she has complete control over the increasingly dangerous situations she finds herself in, perfectly. It is a cover as breathtaking as it is heartbreaking. There could be no other, or better, for this book.
I once said if I could change anything about my career, I would have spent less time trying to prepare readers for stories about girls they might not like, but now I think if I could change anything about my career, I would have spent less time preparing readers for stories about girls.
Before I began this one, I made the promise I always make when I start writing: to relate the world as the book’s female narrator sees it, and her feelings about her body, sex, sexuality, as she feels them—without ever once compromising or couching her perspective for anyone else’s sake. Here are the challenges.
This isn’t the first time I’ve explored the subject of sexual violence in my books, but each of my books is distinct in their understanding that all girls, and the way they experience violence in this world is also distinct. It’s in my focus on that specificity, on the individual interiority of my female main characters, that holds the work’s real challenge: expanding your definitions and understanding of those experiences too, so that you can respond to one girl’s story with empathy. So that you might then do the same in real life.
Because one day, in life, you will meet her.
Don’t turn away.
This is the world that enabled Jeffrey Epstein.
With I’m the Girl, I’m coming for its throat.
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In the lead-up to its September publication, I will be sharing chapters from I’m the Girl in my newsletter every month. Be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss the first two tomorrow.
I've never found any of your girls unlikeable ❤
This sounds incredible. I can't wait to read! And I will not look away.