Dear friends,

It’s true: I wrote a novel, it’s called House of Liars, and I am so very excited to share it with the world later this month. It’s a slow-burn psychological thriller about creativity and motherhood and AI, and early reviews from strangers (complete strangers!) have been heartening. If the book sounds interesting to you, please pre-order the ebook or paperback; you don’t even have to buy it yourself, you can request it at your local library, which helps reach more readers too.

I’ll be doing some podcasts and author talks and other events, in person and online, over the coming months. I won’t blast your inboxes with everything, but the first few are up on my website already, and I’ll be adding more as they get confirmed.

As part of this book launch, I’ve been thinking a lot about scale. Scale was everywhere in tech: How do we scale this product? How do we scale this process? How do I scale myself? I remember having lunch with a UX coworker many years ago at Google’s Fremont office, sitting on the steps that overlooked the canal, and telling him: I recognize the business justification for scale, but all I want for my life is the artisanal, the one-off, the bespoke.

The ego part of me wants House of Liars to reach everyone, everywhere. The wiser part of me wants it to reach a few people who will read it carefully and with a generous heart. The publishing world right now is brutal, churning with AI scandals and commercial pressures, hot takes and take-downs. I can’t protect this novel from the teeth and claws. But I can hold on to the fact that writing this story was a deeply personal act, one that invited me to be creatively courageous day after day after day. It is a book only I could have written. Bespoke, as it were. I hope that if you pick up these pages, it will find resonance with you, too.

Other recommendations from these last few months:

• Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan -- winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024, brilliant, beautiful, absolutely deserving of every good thing.

• Learning by Courtney Bush -- a transcendent novella about a single Monday in the life of a poet who works at a daycare center in New York.

• Coming up: I just ordered Dark Enough by Lauren Belski and Paranoid Storytelling by Judson Merrill, both of which have gotten fantastic reviews and are outputs of a very cool collective, Under the BQE. This kind of intensely community-oriented small-press (dare I say bespoke?) approach to publishing is building the literary future I want to live in.

In the embodied world, near Ridgway on the Western Slope of Colorado, where we lived before we moved to Aotearoa, entire mountainsides are on fire; friends have evacuated and are watching beloved ridgelines burn. Witnessing their pain from so far away is surreal. I ache, doing nothing, but nothing can be done. Just the knowledge that no fire burns forever, and what is scorched will also return.

Hugs,
Jenny