The Collaboration
The Novels
Approaching Delilah: A Novel in Eight Parts
Delilah is determined to escape the stifling confines of rural Ohio—and her small-town boyfriend—for the larger life she believes awaits her in New York City. Certain she is meant for something bigger, she pursues the spotlight with relentless ambition, doing whatever it takes to claim the attention she so deeply craves. Unconventional, thrill-seeking, and unapologetically direct about her desire to be seen, Delilah is immediately recognizable as someone far removed from the grounded Ohio girl our conventional narrator hopes—and needs—her to be.
Set across the fictional town of Paliston, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and New York City, the novel traces events from 1980 to 2021. The narrator, a historian specializing in rare and collectible books, maintains only sporadic contact with Delilah over the course of his adult life. Yet despite their limited interactions, he projects a vast emotional significance onto their relationship, convinced—without evidence—that he occupies an important place in her world. Delilah, flirtatious and unrestrained, occasionally sends him ambiguous signals, but her life unfolds largely without him. His obsession, mostly dismissed by Delilah herself, persists even as she reinvents herself first as a hip, tell-all memoirist and later as an ostentatious Upper East Side trophy wife. What will it take for the narrator to confront his own delusions? How many humiliations, missed opportunities, and quiet reckonings must he endure before he finally removes his distorting glasses?
Approaching Delilah is structured thematically in eight sections, each offering a different lens through which to understand Delilah—Through Humility, Through Art, and beyond. The novel’s humor, tone, and vivid detail are strongly influenced by the work of Haruki Murakami and Joshua Cohen, and it alludes to both Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the biblical story of Samson and Delilah.
I Ain't a Girl
Paul Joseph is a Catholic school teenager with a girlfriend, a starting position on the school’s soccer team, and a recently deceased father. Then, without explanation, his body begins to change: he shrinks, grows long, thick hair, and develops breasts. His mother and the family priest—who is also her lover—attribute the transformation to a mysterious reaction to illicit drug use. Paul Joseph insists he has taken nothing.
When he is forced to publicly live as a girl and threatened with transfer to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, an all-girls school, Paul Joseph runs away. He hides in his late father’s primitive cabin along the Allegheny River, hoping isolation will help him understand what is happening to him. Instead, he is visited by three peculiar figures who compel him to confront his identity, culminating in a violent struggle in which Paul Joseph must fight for both his life and his virtue against an intruder intent on violating—and possibly killing—him.
Set between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, the novel unfolds partly in Paul Joseph’s Pittsburgh home and partly in the remote river cabin. The story is narrated retrospectively in a distinct, unconventional vernacular that evokes a modern-day Huck Finn. Just as Twain’s novel remains famously ambiguous in its treatment of race, I AIN’T A GIRL is deliberately ambiguous in its treatment of gender. Paul Joseph does not identify as female, yet his female body subjects him to misrecognition, sexualization, and the cruelties of patriarchy and social media alike.
The novel is framed as a therapeutic account Paul Joseph has been instructed to write by his therapist, who believes the act of writing will be curative. Paul Joseph remains skeptical—and it is left unclear whether the therapist may have leaked the document to the public.
Tragicomic in tone, the novel’s voice and exploration of identity are influenced by Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, D. Foy’s Made to Break, and Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones. It riffs on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the same way Murakami’s Killing Commendatore riffs on The Great Gatsby and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead reimagines David Copperfield.