I Meant It Once

I Meant It Once explores longing, belonging, and the big emotions that can make us feel small with unusual elegance and depth. – Coco Mellors, author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein

Gorgeously written and staggeringly honest . . . It will bewitch you. – Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch

I Meant It Once signals the arrival of a major talent and voice. – Brandon Taylor, author of Booker Prize Finalist Real Life

I was enraptured by these stories... Perfect for fans of Greta Gerwig. – Edel Coffey

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, preoccupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In "That Is Shocking," a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In "Cinnamon Baseball Coyote" and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world.

Written with crystalline prose and sly humour, the stories in I Meant It Once build to complete a profoundly recognisable portrait of early adulthood and the ways in which seemingly incidental moments can come to define the stories we tell ourselves. For fans of Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, and Melissa Bank, these stories about being young and adrift in today's world go down easy and pack a big punch.

Perceptive, funny, forthright, and often alarmingly relatable, I Meant It Once is a tremendously good debut. – Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had