Its a lot of work, and it reveals your own shortcomings in terrifying ways.' By Jami Attenberg Published: Harper Collins I’ve been watching Chelsey Johnson write her debut novel, 'Stray City,' for almost seven years. She is an assistant professor of English at the College of William & Mary. The Long Road to Stray City 'Writing a novel is like being married to someone. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she's pregnant-and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.Ī decade later, when her precocious daughter Lucia starts asking questions about the father she's never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she's worked so hard to build.Ī thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we're born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons. Chelsey Johnson is the author of Stray City (Custom House/HarperCollins) She received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching Writing Fellow, and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend's betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man.

Twenty-four-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood-and the closet-to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. Chelsey Johnson’s debut novel Stray City was published by Custom House/HarperCollins in 2018, and her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, Elle, Out, and NPR's Selected Shorts, among others. A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable motherhood, and the complications of belonging-to a city, a culture, and a family-when none of them can quite contain who you really are.Īll of us were refugees of the nuclear family.

Stray City by Chelsey Johnson