Misconception

Former sweethearts revisit their teenage love—and their conflicting memories of the past—in this “gem of a first novel” (Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children).

In between business in Iceland and home in Silicon Valley, Cedar Rivers has come to Albany, New York, to meet a woman he hasn’t seen in twenty years. When he knew her, Kat was a cute proto-Goth with chipped black nail polish. Now she’s a literary up-and-comer who has summoned him to vet her new memoir—an account of the summer they were sweethearts. And she’s written parts of it from his point of view.

Through an intense weekend in a snowed-in motel room, Cedar and Kat relive their most painful memories: Before they had a chance at first love, Kat was dragged off on a family sailing trip by her mother and her mother’s new fiancé. Kat returned with a secret, one which—when she shared it with Cedar—set off a series of miscalculated assumptions that snowballed into a startlingly tragic incident.

A tender, absurd, and heartbreaking novel about the unintended consequences of first love and bad judgment, Misconception slyly questions the way we narrate our memories and assign culpability.