How It Works Out
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Audacious, breathtaking, and inspiring.” —GEORGE SAUNDERS
“Madcap, delirious, exhilaratingly good.” —KELLY LINK
“A delightfully bizarre and unabashedly queer revelation.” —TEGAN and SARA QUIN
“A beautifully brilliant, hilariously sad stunner of a debut that never forgets about the heart.” —NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH
What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out?
When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals:
What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee?
From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.
Equal parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a genre-bending, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
LaCroix's provocative first novel traces a lesbian couple's disintegrating relationship across a series of alternate realities. Aspiring musician Allison works at a call center and deems herself the "breadwinner," barely supporting artist Myriam in their run-down punk house in East Vancouver, British Columbia. Their lurid story plays out in a series of speculative chapters. In one, the couple finds a baby abandoned in an alley, names him Jonah, and raises him with the help of his birth mother. In another, it's Allison who gives birth to Jonah. At age 17, he's sent to prison for murdering and eating his high school boyfriend, in a gruesome variation on an earlier episode when Allison lost a finger in an ice-skating accident and Myriam kept it to eat. In each version of reality, Myriam's depression and germophobia drive the primary wedge between the couple and prompt their separation ("I need to stop using relationships as a crutch for my mental illness," Myriam tells her therapist). LaCroix's experiments with a multiverse structure and body horror generate potent symbols for the struggles of queer relationships, as does her biting wit (here's Myriam, describing the tension caused by Allison's determination to launch her music career: "I could practically see the to-do list in her eyes, scrolling by like the opening of Star Wars"). Readers won't soon forget LaCroix's singular voice.
