Verwandte Artikel zu My Person

My Person - Softcover

Mutonji, Téa

 
9798217434053: My Person
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798217434053
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

"Téa Mutonji writes sharply about the subtle ruptures endemic to formative friendships." —Raven Leilani, bestselling author of Luster

"Sexy, infuriating, and unbelievably fun to read . . . This is a writer who can read someone to filth in just one line." —Katie Yee, author of Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

A bold debut from an exhilarating, multi-award-winning young writer, following two lifelong friends who suddenly find themselves in an emotional deadlock when one abruptly proposes to break up after years of subtle betrayals.

Best friends of over twenty years, Tania and Margot are preparing to host their monthly Sunday Loaf dinner party, when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore—they’ve been entangled for too long, she wants to "unknow" her. But how do you extricate yourself from someone whose family owns the apartment you live in, who has taken you in as their own, even claims you as their "person”?

As Tania attempts to live her life loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s bubble, Margot’s past betrayals become increasingly clear. But she means well, doesn’t she? They had felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania just been blind to Margot’s antics? Set in the framework of a tense will-they-won’t-they break-up, Tania and Margot get entangled in a rigorous revision of history, their once delicate dance intensifying toward a frantic finale that neither person sees coming.

A taut, piercing exploration of race and privilege, codependency, and the ways in which world-defining friendships can be both beautifully and excruciatingly life altering, My Person is an addicting, astutely observed novel from an astonishing new talent.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection of short stories, Shut Up You’re Pretty was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019) and Canada Reads (2024). It won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji was a recipient of the Writer’s Trust Rising Star’s award (2022) and received the Jill Davis Fellowship (2021) at New York University where she completed her MFA in fiction.

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Chapter one

Margot and I were preparing to host our monthly dinner party when I told her this wasn't working for me anymore. I had decided to end our friendship earlier that evening while grocery shopping at the Metro in our neighborhood. I'd filled my cart with all the ingredients I would need to make meat loaf, which I made every Sunday when we'd host these parties-our Sunday Loaf parties. It was Margot's favorite meal, my mother's recipe, a staple in our home. It was my way of saying: Yes, I want this to end, but look at how much I still care. It took eight minutes to walk through the Metro parking lot and back to the apartment. I wasn't thinking of anything. Our friendship did not flash before me like some kind of dead-wife montage in a film. I did not experience some kind of come-to-Jesus moment in which the Earth cracked open. There was no sudden realization. It was all just cool.

Outside, it was dark. Women wore workout sets while walking their dogs, goldendoodles in their creamy apricot coats. Really, I wasn't thinking of anything critically, except dodging dog shit. The air was stiff and shifted my mood; I became melancholic, felt even a little exhilarated with anticipation. We'd been hosting these dinner parties since I moved in, not this past August, but the August the year before. It began with a housewarming. Weeks later, on the first Sunday of the following month, I made the meat loaf again for the exact same group of people, and like that, we'd created a tradition.

Before all this, when I had floated the idea of us living together, our friends expressed concerns about our compatibility. She's so type A, they said. And you've just sold your next book, don't writers need solitude to write? Still, the Sunday Loaf parties had evolved into a celebration of our love. Margot and I always color-coordinated our dresses-merlot or crimson in the fall, shades of blue in the winter, pastels in the spring. We decorated the apartment according to the season and collaborated on the menu. But the meat loaf remained the centerpiece. We both agreed this was proof that we really were in this for the long run. "This" being our friendship, our community, the fine china we displayed in the wooden cabinet behind the dining table.

I was aiming for a clean separation without any complications. I couldn't figure out an exact reason for wanting to leave. This was causing me a lot of stress, because Margot was the kind of person who'd need an exact reason. There was a void I couldn't quite explain and this voice in my head that kept saying: It's time to go. But I couldn't say that to Margot because I did not want to be therapized. She'd gently present that I was just "being a poet" then suggest I needed a meaningful vacation, somewhere like Delhi. I'd find myself crazed with a sudden loss of faculties and agree with her, and if I wasn't careful, I might even end up on a red-eye to a meditation retreat, paid for by Margot. A gift she'd then hold over me for the rest of our lives.

I did not write poetry anymore. It had not paid me enough to feed myself, so I'd turned to fiction. I was trying to write a second novel that my agent sold a few weeks before I moved in with Margot. At the time of acquisition, I had a finished first draft. Then, when I moved in, something about the draft suddenly wasn't working, so I deleted everything and convinced my editor to pause on the edits, assuring her that I'd have a fresh manuscript by winter. That deadline was a year ago and still I had nothing. They had to push the pub date and remove the book from the catalog, which didn't really mean anything to me because I did not understand what a catalog was. But I knew that I was in hot water. After I missed my deadline, I rarely answered my editor's emails or calls. The advance, the awards, the being-recognized-at-Toronto-indie-bookstores-it was just distracting me from the real work. Not that I didn't appreciate the exposure, but I desired a more secluded life. I thought I could just write a little book and resume my little life of being, for example, someone's person. Because I did desire that-intimacy, joy. And I no longer knew if Margot was it for me, or if we were one of those magical accidents that leave you saying: fuck.

Here's everything I knew about Marguerite on a superficial level: She was white, for starters. We called her Margot because she told us to. It was a self-appointed nickname that turned into an identity. Margot because she was blonde and lean with brown eyes. Margot because her hair had recently been cut into a straight bob, her face was shaped like an upside-down triangle. Margot because it suited her. Made her sound serious, a little cunty. She had wide hips, which was a point of agreement for her, said her hips were made for birthing, called them love handles, as in "love knobs," thought they made her look like a woman who would have an easy time bringing life into the world.

Margot was supposed to be a stay-at-home mother by now. Instead, she was a social media specialist for a luxury bridal shop, where she felt crazy constantly witnessing other people's happiness. Crazy on Margot looked like desperation. It gave her some kind of edge. I had a thing for a woman with some kick to her. My mother was an extreme version of such a woman. As for Margot, she was the kind to wear Lululemon exclusively. She had a fat ass and ate lettuce frequently. She walked around with a Yeti mug and preferred to speak directly into her Apple Watch as opposed to just typing out a text. It was easy to correctly categorize her as a woman who lived in Liberty Village, but to be fair, so did I.

Margot's big internal conflict was that she was failing at convincing her boyfriend to put a baby in her. The boyfriend was named Ryan. I paid exactly no mind to him whatsoever, unless he came up in conversation with Margot. The thing was: He showed no signs of wanting what she wanted. Children, for example, were a nonstarter for him. Marriage was capitalism set on fire. This was at the root of all their problems, however, and in the year of my and Margot's joint cohabitation, this became my problem too. Her job was light work, so she had all day to obsess over her uterus, the amount of mucus she discharged between cycles, her chances of getting pregnant after thirty. I understood that she was going through a lot. It didn't feel right to leave someone worse off than I had found them.

Except that, as Eli had recently pointed out, I found Margot twenty-two years ago. Surely, he had said during one of our late-night phone calls, there's room for negotiation, maybe you can redefine the terms of your friendship. I didn't know what he meant by that, and I didn't ask. Eli was Margot's cousin. Yes, there had been a time in childhood when I was undeniably in love with him. He was into books and so cool, had taught Margot and me how to hit a bong, and whenever we were alone together, there was this electricity that raptured me. And yes, Margot had explicitly asked me not to fuck her cousin, so I'd spent my life working overtime to keep those thoughts out of my head. And then one day they were just gone.

Eli was in finance, like all the men in Margot's family. He had this big, logical, disciplined brain that made him act like an older brother to us both. Similar to the rest of their relatives, he had an all-American look. He was clean-shaven, blond, brown-eyed too. Thin, rosy lips. He checked in on me regularly, treated me the way he treated Margot. I could have been anyone, I understood that. His kindness wasn't about me, it was just his nature. I was the impulsive one, Margot was the dramatic one, and Eli was the warmth. He was the calm. Older by only a year but he knew, almost professionally, how to pull us back. He did not call as frequently as he used to. He was getting married. I supported that. It was just that, without his...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217434053
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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