THE LONG ANSWER

This debut novel focuses on women's experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, or infertility. Anna, a fiction writing student who is pregnant with her first baby, is the narrator of the four parts of the novel, each of which centers around the part's title woman.

Part I, "Elizabeth," tells the story of Elizabeth's marriage, miscarriage, and divorce that all took place before she was twenty-five. "Corrie" (Part II) confesses the affair she had as a teenager with her older sister's boyfriend during her sister's pregnancy. "Marisol" (Part IV) recalls how, as a young woman, she left her family to live with a middle-aged artist and his girlfriend in rural Maine, where she experienced a sexual awakening, donated her eggs and felt the pain of her first unrequited love. In Part III, "Anna & Ruth," Anna tells her own story, breaking the form of the other parts.

Each part is between 50 and 70 pages, and the novel in total is just over 84,000 words.

THE LONG ANSWER is an intimate, unbearably private sequence of stories which seem as if they would be shared only just this once & never again. The fraught urgency of its subject is belied by the warmth of the narrator's voice and reserved, translucent prose.

Anna graduated in 2019 from the MFA program at University of California, Irvine, where she studied with Michelle Latiolais, Danzy Senna, Amy Gerstler, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. Previously she received her Master's in Social Work from Smith College and Bachelor's from Bates College. She grew up in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts and currently lives in Boston with her husband and infant daughter, where she is in private practice as a psychotherapist and teaches writing at GrubStreet.