STORIES

The Mississippi Review (forthcoming 2024-25)

The Iowa Review (2024)

Fugue (2024) 

Joyland (2023)

The Adroit Journal (2023)

Nimrod (2020) 

The Lunatic is a novel that explores the ways in which contemporary American society constructs – and deconstructs – the female psyche. The plot follows a defiant young artist as she joins a women’s therapy group, a motley crowd who confront both personal psychological distress and structural, systematic threats. Set in the heart of New Orleans, the book asks how technology, pharmacology, and misogyny might intersect. 

With both satirical sincerity and sentimental irony, the novel investigates the nuances of mental illness, artistic liberation, and intersectional womanhood. The work is perhaps best described as feminist cooption of metamodernist philosophies, given its mediation between opposites: subjectivity and objectivity, individuality and community, cynicism and idealism. 

In addressing themes that range from the medicalized invalidation of female pain to the transference between the artistic and the experiential, The Lunatic ultimately aims to engage the frontiers of female suffering that challenge the social paradigms of sanity.