Losing it has gotten some great reviews from the Washington Post to the New York Times!
Losing It by Emma Rathbone
Released on July 19, 2016 by Riverbed Books
Julia Greenfield has a problem: she’s twenty-six years old and she’s still a virgin. Sex ought to be easy. People have it all the time! But, without meaning to, she made it through college and into adulthood with her virginity intact. Something’s got to change.
To re-route herself from her stalled life, Julia travels to spend the summer with her mysterious aunt Vivienne in North Carolina. It’s not long, however, before she unearths a confounding secret—her 58 year old aunt is a virgin too. In the unrelenting heat of the southern summer, Julia becomes fixated on puzzling out what could have lead to Viv’s appalling condition, all while trying to avoid the same fate.
Filled with offbeat characters and subtle, wry humor, Losing It is about the primal fear that you just. might. never. meet. anyone. It’s about desiring something with the kind of obsessive fervor that almost guarantees you won’t get it. It’s about the blurry lines between sex and love, and trying to figure out which one you’re going for. And it’s about the decisions—and non-decisions—we make that can end up shaping a life.
Excerpt
The next day I stood in a small art gallery attached to a sandwich shop, waiting for them to call my name with my order, and stared at an acrylic painting of a bowl of fruit. One of the pieces of fruit had a face and was wearing a court jester’s hat.
“Chance Moon Lively,” said someone behind me.
I turned around. It was Elliot.
“You’re always doing that,” I said.
“Doing what?”
“Coming up behind me and saying something.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, it’s the name of the artist.”
“Well, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” I said, and moved to the next painting, another acrylic of a mythic, godlike man holding a lightning bolt, sitting hunched over at a bar.
Elliot was holding a salad in a plastic tub, and here, out of the office and in the light of day, he looked hunched and smaller. His ponytail was pulled especially tight, and I thought I saw some flakes of dry skin where his hair parted.
“He’s a good friend of mine,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Just kidding.” He smiled.
I didn’t want to take the baton and fall into some kind of warm banter with him. I walked to the next painting.
“What, are you really plugged into the local art scene or something?” I said.
“Sort of,” he said, following me. “I actually do know a few people who do stuff. I have a couple friends who own galleries.” He pointed at the lightning bolt painting. “This can be yours for only five hundred dollars.”
“What a steal,” I said.
A woman with a greasy braid and a pinched expression came up to us. She looked at a receipt. “Julia Greenfield?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Your sandwich is ready. We’ve been calling your name for ten minutes,” she said.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I’ve just been in here.”
“Well, this isn’t technically part of the shop.”
“Oh, okay,” I said.
She turned and walked away. Elliot was smiling at me. I could tell he wanted for us to be in this moment together, for it to be something we could laugh about, build on. There was something I found unpleasant about his manner—holding a salad, unevenly trying to hit on me when he had a wife.
“Well,” I said, “I better go get my sandwich.”
“Hey,” he said, more seriously, blocking my way. He motioned with his salad. “After you get your sandwich, do you want to walk to the park together?”
His bearing, the way he asked me, was somehow acknowledging everything that had gone on between us—my crush on him and how I hadn’t caught on that he was married, and I got the sense that he felt sorry for me and was just trying to make me feel better. To be friends. All of this made me angry and I wanted to leave.
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About the Author
Emma Rathbone is the author of the novel The Patterns of Paper Monsters. She is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Grant in Fiction, and her work can also be seen in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a writer for the upcoming Netflix comedy, G.L.O.W. She lives in Los Angeles.
I read about fifty pages of this book before putting it aside as it wasn’t speaking to me. It may have been my mood or the fact that other louder books were calling my name!