THE LIFE OF THE PARTY

Think about the last great party that you went to. What do you think made it great? Did they have a delicious signature cocktail with a clever, punny name? An illustrious guest list? Did they play all of Charli XCX's Brat, in order?

Or, when you really think about it, was it something else, something more surprising and intangible, that made it so special? THE LIFE OF THE PARTY: The Transformational Power of Bringing People Together is writer and therapist hannah baer's treatise on how to throw a party, but, more than that, it is a book about how throwing parties can radically reconfigure our relationships to the world and to each other. A cross between Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering and Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, THE LIFE OF THE PARTY will help readers learn that it is within everyone's power to throw a party that disrupts the mundanity of day-to-day life, leaving both hosts and guests transformed. The book will be structured over the life cycle of a party, with chapters addressing all the questions big and small that a host faces before, during, and after a function, such as how to organize a guest list and how to not worry if everyone is having enough fun. Throughout, hannah will braid in cultural history, psychology, and personal anecdotes, showing how medieval carnivals, ancient Greek hosting traditions, and contemporary rave culture all relate to recent social science research on bringing people together. THE LIFE OF THE PARTY marries hannah's expertise as a therapist, her personal passion for raving and party throwing, and her skillful, lovely writing. It promises to be as entertaining as it will be informative and insightfulto paraphrase hannah herself, even if you've never planned to throw a party, THE LIFE OF THE PARTY will still be fun to read on the beach. It'll therefore appeal to the tentative, shy reader as much as to the extroverted and gregarious, because it's never overly prescriptive, and is instead kindly welcoming all readers to think about how to organize their lives around experiences and around each other. This book is hannah's much-needed salve for the modern era's loneliness epidemic, and we expect the book to bring delight and openness to people's lives. hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. Her cult memoir trans girl suicide museum was published by Hesse Press (a small Los Angeles-based art book press) in 2020 and has since sold approximately 7,000+ copies with virtually zero marketing or publicity, and has been taught in undergraduate and graduate courses in queer theory and creative writing at Columbia, the University of Chicago, UCLA, USC, and the New School, among other places. hannah's writing has been featured in Artforum, The Guardian, n+1, Jewish Currents, Parapraxis, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Frieze, and Unherd. She has read, lectured, and performed for dozens of audiences in the US and UK, alongside artists and writers including Brontez Purnell, Gary Indiana, McKenzie Wark, and Chloe Sevigny, among many others. In June of 2023, a self-portrait she created, Nude Deepfake, was featured on the cover of Artforum (on view at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in 2024) accompanying an article she wrote on artificial intelligence and psychology. Along with Cyrus Dunham and Emily Segal she is one of the founding editors of Deluge Books. Her Instagram account, @malefragility, has over 50 thousand followers.