The Gloomy Girl Variety Show: A Memoir is now available 🥲

IT'S PUBLICATION DAY!!!

Dear Readers,

TODAY IS PUBLICATION DAY!!! You can purchase Gloomy Girl wherever books are sold. My favorite retailers at Feminist Press & Downbound Books!

I wanted to share a little reflection on this journey to publish Gloomy Girl:

I moved to Ohio fleeing trauma. Fresh off of two years in and out of mental hospitals post-undergrad. Before my move, I was under-employed, broke, experiencing my first heartbreak, with an achiever complex (Nigerian immigrant parents, gifted and talented education classes, thrust into my first experience with an Ivy League level predominantly white institution) who for the first time, didn’t know what the future looked like. That’s scary. It makes sense. I see it now. I was clinically depressed with PTSD. I see it now. Unfortunately, I don’t come from a background or a time period (long before widespread discussions of self-care were ever a thing) where this is automatically believed.

For the last ten years since beginning Gloomy Girl, I’ve been on what I now understand as a “healing journey” thanks to social media. Another specific joy in aging for me is the growth of the internet and how much more accessible the experiences of other humans are. Hashtags are another way of archiving an experience. For the last ten years, I have been searching for joy. This is the first time I am writing from that feeling. It feels really good.

A lot of Gloomy Girl was written from somewhat of an “out of touch with reality” place. Stuck in cognitive distortions about myself. I wrote through those distortions, year after year, to get to a place where that was no longer my default.

The joy in writing and being a reader is similar to the joy in a hashtag or an archive, putting language to an experience and finding others like you. So though my main motivation in writing Gloomy Girl was to heal myself, I also had a dream that it may have the power to heal some of you or at least be a starting place. That is my hope for this book on publication day and the launch tomorrow. *You have the power to help others just like you did for yourself. That’s fucking cool!* The joy in aging is in an exclamation mark next to an affirmation and believing it.

Happy Gloomy Girl Day! See you tomorrow at 6:30pm The Mercantile Library for my launch party!

Register here! 💙🌧🧡

In Gloomy Girl News:

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly

• Library Journal

• Kirkus Reviews

• Publishers Weekly

Press

• Memoirland – Q&A

• Debutiful - 10 noteworthy debut books you should read this January

• Marin County Independent – 36 New Books Coming in early 2025

• Orange County Register – 36 New Books Coming in early 2025

• Press Telegram – 36 New Books Coming in early 2025

• Write or Die – 20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read

• Chicago Review of Books - Our Most Anticipated Books of 2025

• Debutiful – Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2025 Part 1

• Bending Genres Journal – review by Britta Stromeyer

• Brittle Paper, early spotlight on the book