Remainders

Two years after her best friend, Mia, dies unexpectedly in the spring of their senior year, 20-year-old Avery is paralyzed with grief, circling the drain in her suburban desert hometown. Once goofy and ambitious, Avery has calcified herself into all hard edges. Stuck working a job she despises to maintain a life she’s sick of living, Avery schemes to earn some easy money by returning to her high school babysitting gig, working for Joel & Kristin Bloom with their 11-year-old daughter, Norah. 

However, it’s immediately clear that time has changed The Blooms as well. Norah is no longer the precocious kid that Avery remembers — she’s grown up belligerent, teetering on the edge of puberty and reeling from her mother’s cancer diagnosis. As the summer burns on, Avery becomes more and more involved with the Blooms, spending her days with Norah and her nights blowing off steam, bickering, and binge drinking her way into a tentative new friendship with Mia’s older brother, Jamie, who has just returned to town with an unfinished Film degree and a lime green cast on his wrist.

Remainders is a novel about death and connection, a funny-sad cannonball into the messy, intimate world of childcare and grief.

(about 100,000 words)
excerpt ⟶