Love + Time + 10,000 Emails + Editing = Anthology

Love in the Time of Time's Up

In January 2020, not long after word of a lethal virus in China began to terrorize our collective consciousness, no surprise, I was, like many others I knew, mired in my own petty worries, among them, the unhappy state of my career as a (midlist) novelist.

Instead of putting my dwindling energy into writing another novel that wasn’t likely to sell (more on this topic here), I came up with an idea for an anthology about bad sex, bad relationships, and people behaving like dirtbags (not all of them men).

Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker short story, “Cat Person,” published in early December 2017, went viral, catching a ride on the runaway train of Harvey Weinstein’s arrest and its media coverage earlier that year. The New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman expressed surprise at how many people were interested in stories about relationships gone dramatically off the rails—she hadn’t previously seen a story go viral like this one.

As a sometime-writer of these sort of stories, I thought, Why not a whole book of them?

After 2+ years of intermittent work, Love in the Time of Time’s Up was published. Here’s an excerpt from one of the stories written in the form of instructive Tinder messages:

The anthology’s table of contents:

Below I’ve pasted more excerpts (alphabetical by author).

If you’re interested in a book club or writing program conversation via Zoom, please send me a note or leave a comment below. Other contributors have told me they’d be interested in participating too, time permitting.

Montgomery imagines Brett Kavanaugh in the confessional.

Postscript: I highly recommend the essay linked to below by

Matthew Specktor

. (His forthcoming book is The Golden Hour—stay tuned!)

Slow Players #12: "The Only Tonic for The Light" (Tolkin/Altman)