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Still Life – Katherine Packert Burke

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 Author: Katherine Packert Burke  Category: General Fiction  Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company  Published: September 10, 2024  ISBN: 9781324076360  Pages: 272  Language: English  Tags: Trans Woman / Femme Character(s) |  Alibris  Amazon  Bookshop org  Kobo  Publisher  Find in a Library
 Description:

Everything in Edith’s life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead.

Still Life volleys between the present and recent past, chronicling the lives of three women—one cis, two trans, all forever entwined. Edith was a bumbling “boy” pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to the musical backdrop of their fledgling adulthood. When Edith decides to leave behind the East Coast for graduate school, she begins a years long journey away from the person she loves most and toward a hazy new understanding of who she will become.

In the present, Edith visits Boston feeling like a failure of a writer, a failure of a girl, and wracked with guilt over Val’s death. Val, the intrepid wanderer, had drifted in and out of Edith’s life, arriving in Texas with estrogen pills and wisdom from a life on the road. A sometimes lover, sometimes trans mentor, Val was everything Tessa wasn’t and everything Edith needed. Home alone in Texas, she is left loveless and exhausted as the state slowly chips away at trans rights. Was Val’s fatal car crash Edith’s fault? Would she have stayed put if Edith had loved her better?

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About the author

Katherine Packert Burke

Katherine is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in San Diego and the MFA program at the University of Alabama. Her debut novel, Still Life, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. She lives in Austin, TX. Website: https://katherinepackertburke.com/  

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