fellowship point book review nytimes

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

FELLOWSHIP POINT

by Alice Elliott Dark ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2022

Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America.

A sweeping story of lifelong best friends from Philadelphia Quaker families who share a vacation spot and a moral exigency.

Dark confesses in her acknowledgments that she had “doubts about the appeal of two old ladies,” but she's written the rare 592-page novel you'll be sorry to finish. Eighty-year-old spinster Agnes Lee is the successful author of two series of books. She’s known for one of them, 30-plus children’s tales about a 9-year-old named Nan. The other is written under a pseudonym, six sharp social satires following a circle of upper-class Philadelphia girls like the ones Agnes grew up with. But as the curtain opens in March 2000, Agnes is having her very first experience of writer's block, described in one of many astute passages about the writing life: “Agnes had lost hope for today, too, but her allotted writing time wasn’t up yet. So she sat. Her rule was five hours, and dammit she’d put in five hours.” Just as she packs it in for the day, her best friend, Polly Wister, a devoted wife and mother, arrives for a drink. “We have a problem,” says Agnes. The problem is that they are two of the last three shareholders in Fellowship Point, a large, and largely undeveloped, piece of coastal property in Maine where their families have vacationed for generations. After the two of them are gone, Agnes’ cousin, a wealthy dolt, seems likely to sell out to a developer who would tear down the 19th-century dwellings, destroy a nature sanctuary, and overrun an ancient Indigenous meeting ground to build a resort. Agnes and Polly have other problems, too, each of them held back by choices made long in the past, some of which will be dug out by a nosy young New York editor who’s determined to make Agnes write a memoir. You will surely want to read this book, but you may be able to use its essential wisdom right now: “There wasn’t time for withholding, not in this short life when you were only given to know a few people, and to have a true exchange with one or two.”

Pub Date: July 5, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982131-81-4

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books

Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Alice Elliott Dark

BOOK REVIEW

by Alice Elliott Dark

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

HOME IS WHERE THE BODIES ARE

by Jeneva Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024

Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.

Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.

Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.

Pub Date: April 30, 2024

ISBN: 9798212182843

Page Count: 270

Publisher: Blackstone

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

More by Jeneva Rose

by Jeneva Rose

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

Why is Christian Science in our name?

Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that.

The Church publishes the Monitor because it sees good journalism as vital to progress in the world. Since 1908, we’ve aimed “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind,” as our founder, Mary Baker Eddy, put it.

Here, you’ll find award-winning journalism not driven by commercial influences – a news organization that takes seriously its mission to uplift the world by seeking solutions and finding reasons for credible hope.

Your subscription makes our work possible.

We want to bridge divides to reach everyone.

Deepen your worldview with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads .

Select free newsletters:

A thoughtfully curated selection of our most popular news stories and podcasts.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

Hear about special editorial projects, new product information, and upcoming events.

An update on major political events, candidates, and parties twice a week.

Twice a Week

Stay informed about the latest scientific discoveries & breakthroughs.

Every Tuesday

A weekly digest of Monitor views and insightful commentary on major events.

Every Thursday

Latest book reviews, author interviews, and reading trends.

Every Friday

A weekly update on music, movies, cultural trends, and education solutions.

The three most recent Christian Science articles with a spiritual perspective.

Every Monday

Friendship tested, lives transformed in sublime novel ‘Fellowship Point’

• Deep Read ( 4 Min. )
• By Heller McAlpin Contributor

July 4, 2022

Author Alice Elliott Dark sets her sublime new novel, “Fellowship Point,” in Maine, which has long attracted writers with its rugged coastline and deep woodlands. 

The landscape lends itself to stories about tensions between locals and summer people, and between developers and conservationists. 

Why We Wrote This

Alice Elliott Dark’s magnificent novel affirms that change and growth are possible at any age. As her main characters let down their guard and shed old habits, they experience transformation.

At the same time, she celebrates the beauty – and sticking points – of a lifelong friendship between two women whose choices have taken them down different paths. 

At the novel’s center is 80-year-old Agnes Lee, a writer who is beloved for a series of children’s books. She, her best friend, and several other families spend summers at Fellowship Point. But now that part of the property is under threat from developers, Agnes wants to enlist her friend’s help to stop it.   

It is hard to write about this novel without gushing. Its characters, settings, and deftly woven plot pull you right in, the better to soak in its reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, “Fellowship Point” is about caring for the places and people we love.

Maine, long attractive to writers for its rocky coastlines, woodlands, and wildlife, lends itself to stories about tensions between locals and summer people, and between developers and conservationists. In her exquisitely written, utterly engrossing new novel, “Fellowship Point,” Alice Elliott Dark explores these strains while celebrating Maine’s gorgeous but threatened landscape. At the same time, she celebrates the beauty – and sticking points – of a lifelong friendship between two women whose choices have taken them down different paths.   

It is hard to write about this novel without gushing. You sink into it with a sigh of contentment, as into a hot bath. Its characters, settings, and deftly woven plot pull you right in, the better to soak in its reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, “Fellowship Point” is about caring for the places and people we love.

Dark is best known for her twice-filmed, prizewinning story, “In the Gloaming.” First published in The New Yorker in 1993, it is about a mother who, in losing a son to AIDS, rediscovers what it means to really love and be loved. Dark, who teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Newark, has been working on “Fellowship Point” for nearly 20 years. It shows. There is nothing half-baked about it.  

At the novel’s center is 80-year-old Agnes Lee, a writer who has never married. She is beloved for her “When Nan” series of children’s books about a plucky 9-year-old girl’s adventures, beginning with “When Nan Was a Lobsterman” in 1965 to the most recent installment, “When Nan Ran a Wind Farm.” But what Agnes considers her real work are her six “Franklin Square” novels, published one per decade under a pseudonym, which enabled her to write undercover about women from her tony Philadelphia social set. To her dismay, these women, like her best friend Polly Wister, made “themselves smaller in order to fit into the roles available to them. Their talents were subsumed into utility and support.” Agnes intended her books as “cautionary tales ... that real women would learn from.” 

We meet Agnes in 2000, struggling to write one last Franklin Square novel. She is less concerned about her recent cancer diagnosis than the future of Fellowship Point, the coastal peninsula in Maine where she has summered her whole life and felt most free and happy. In 1872, her great-grandfather, William Lee, a Philadelphia Quaker from a rich merchant family, bought 145 acres on Maine’s fictional Cape Deel and established the Fellowship Point Association with his brother and three Quaker friends. Its rules state that its five members would own shares in the association rather than individual plots of land. Further, shares tied to the five “capacious, yet not absurd” family cottages William designed were to be passed down to only one blood-relative member in each succeeding generation. Agnes and Polly are the current shareholders of their family’s cottages, Leeward and Meadowlee.  

William and his descendants have particularly treasured a 35-acre wildlife sanctuary at the property’s tip, dubbed the Sank. But to Agnes’ dismay, this hallowed land, formerly Abenaki territory, is threatened with desecration by a local developer who hopes to build a resort and village on Fellowship Point by luring shareholders with the promise of an economic windfall. Agnes’ counter-plan, which changes somewhat over the course of the novel, is to muster the required majority of shareholders – three votes – to dissolve the association and establish a trust to protect the land. She is counting on her friend Polly to support this move, but, frustratingly, Polly doesn’t do anything without consulting the men in her life.

Dark sets up a tug of war between Agnes’ strident independence and Polly’s deference to her self-important husband and money-hungry eldest son, who belittle her at every turn. Several contingent plotlines add intrigue, including the unfortunate ordeal of a smart local landscaper who is falsely accused of theft by Agnes’ ostentatious cousin Archie Lee, a shareholder eager to capitalize on his holdings. The other two original families no longer come to Fellowship Point, and we eventually learn what happened to one of them 40 years earlier. Dark cleverly uses Agnes’ intimate notebooks written at the time to pull off this long flashback.  

“Fellowship Point” has the complexity, pace, and length of an absorbing 19th century epic. Another narrative strand involves an ambitious New York editorial assistant named Maud Silver, who hopes she can jumpstart her publishing career by convincing Agnes to write a memoir callled “Agnes When,” about how she came to write the “When Nan” books, now celebrated for their proto-feminism. Agnes, with big secrets to hide, pushes back, but can’t help being impressed by Maud’s mettle – especially when she learns that the young woman, a single mother, is further saddled with the guardianship of her intractably depressed mother. 

The novel’s various plotlines dovetail with amazing grace, culminating in a moving, well-earned climax. “Fellowship Point” is, on one level, the story of how Agnes gradually lets down her guard and opens up, beginning with her uncharacteristic decision to share her notebooks from the early 1960s, a turning point in her life. “It’s awful what we do to ourselves by not talking openly,” she comments. Polly, too, blossoms with her recognition of how the “habit of a lifetime of acquiescence” had prevented her from recognizing her own intelligence. This magnificent novel affirms that change and growth are possible at any age.  

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for The Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

Help fund Monitor journalism for $11/ month

Already a subscriber? Login

Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.

Our work isn't possible without your support.

Unlimited digital access $11/month.

Digital subscription includes:

• Unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
• CSMonitor.com archive.
• The Monitor Daily email.
• No advertising.
• Cancel anytime.

Related stories

Review ‘horse’ unfolds a riveting tale of a champion thoroughbred and his enslaved trainer, review an octopus, a widow, and a decades-long missing-person case, review consolation in solitude: retracing the steps of henry david thoreau, share this article.

Link copied.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

Subscription expired

Your subscription to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. You can renew your subscription or continue to use the site without a subscription.

Return to the free version of the site

If you have questions about your account, please contact customer service or call us at 1-617-450-2300 .

This message will appear once per week unless you renew or log out.

Session expired

Your session to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. We logged you out.

No subscription

You don’t have a Christian Science Monitor subscription yet.

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Search: Title Author Article Search String:

Fellowship Point : Book summary and reviews of Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark

Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books

Fellowship Point

by Alice Elliott Dark

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' rating:

Published Jul 2022 592 pages Genre: Historical Fiction Publication Information

Rate this book

About this book

Book summary.

The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century.

Celebrated children's book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy—to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, and philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself? Agnes's designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes's resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. Fellowship Point reads like a classic 19th-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores; a deep and empathic interest in women's lives, the class differences that divided us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, a reckoning with intimacy, history, and posterity. It is a masterwork from Alice Elliott Dark.

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"Dark ( Think of England ) celebrates women's friendships and artistic mentorship in this expansive yet intimate novel. The families and their grudges and grievances fill a broad canvas, and within it Dark delves deeply into the relationships between Agnes and her work, humans and the land, mothers and children, and, most indelibly, the sustenance and joy provided by a long-held female friendship. It's a remarkable achievement." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A sweeping story of lifelong best friends...you will surely want to read this book. Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America." - Kirkus (starred review) "Dark's novel takes on serious topics, from patriarchy to capitalism, with a multifaceted main character and a story line that's as surprising as it is satisfying. Sure to please fans of literary women's fiction like the work of Elizabeth Strout." - Library Journal " Fellowship Point is a marvel. Intricately constructed, utterly unique, this novel set on the coast of Maine is filled with insights about writing, about the perils and freedoms of aging, about the great mysteries, as well as the pleasures, of life. The story about the relationships between three women unfolds, as life does, through joys and losses, confrontations and confessions, with twists along the way that change your perception of all that came before. This is a world is so closely and acutely observed that I felt I lived in it. I was sorry to leave." - Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author " Fellowship Point is deeply relevant in its concerns—about the land, the creatures who inhabit it, and the legacies of ownership, stewardship, and friendship—but it's also just a great, absorbing, and transformative read. Like a Maine glade, Dark's book is filled with light." - Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days and In Zanesville "I fell into Fellowship Point --fell in step and in love with its characters, with its landscape, with its ideas about art and marriage and, above all, friendship. It's a beautifully passionate book about what it means to love a place and to love all the people of your life, and how life itself is a riveting plot and deep mystery." - Elizabeth McCracken, New York Times bestselling author of Bowlaway and The Giant's House

Click here and be the first to review this book!

Author Information

Alice elliott dark.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author Think of England and two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist . Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories , and O. Henry: Prize Stories , among others. Her award-winning story "In the Gloaming" was made into two films. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program.

More Author Information

More Recommendations

Readers also browsed . . ..

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
• The Painter's Daughters by Emily Howes
• The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
• The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan
• Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard
• The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller
• The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
• Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung
• James by Percival Everett
• Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See

more historical fiction...

Support BookBrowse

Join our inner reading circle, go ad-free and get way more!

Find out more

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history.

Who Said...

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Solve this clue:

R is a D B S C

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Book Review: FELLOWSHIP POINT by Alice Elliott Dark

Alice Elliott Dark’s beautiful, sprawling novel Fellowship Point is about land and stewardship, about nature and conservation, but more than that, it is a book of friendship across the decades and about the complexities of women’s lives, told in part by two extraordinary narrators who experienced nearly a century of life in the world.

Agnes Lee and Polly Wister, in their eighties, have known each other all their lives, having become friends as children on the coast of Maine as neighbors in the idyllic community of Fellowship Point. They couldn’t be more different—Agnes is a fiercely independent, successful author who never married; Polly is the mother of three boys and an overly devoted wife to her demanding husband, Dick. As the novel opens, the two old friends meet to talk about the future of Fellowship Point. 

With its owners restricted by bylaws formed by its founders in the nineteenth century, Fellowship Point could be at risk of development rather than preservation, unless arrangements are made—and of particular concern is the thirty-five-acre sanctuary at the tip of the peninsula, known as “the Sank,” whose bird population, including eagles, could potentially disappear. Since the 1870s, when Fellowship Point was developed—five large family “cottages,” with a small cluster of houses for the staff of the homeowners—nature was the primary focus. Back then, the Lee family, “frugal and plain,” let their homes go while taking painstaking care of the land: “Wallpaper peeled. Dishes chipped. Silver tarnished. But the underbrush was carefully cleaned beneath the trees in the Sank, and the beds and meadows fed and artfully trimmed to appear Edenically wild.”

Agnes feels “sometimes she could draw on the beauty so whole-heartedly that she felt as though she had metabolized it, and that it had become an organ inside of her … she was determined to keep it safe for the birds, the animals, the flowers, the trees.” A true environmentalist—“All living creatures were whole. End of story”—Agnes had not eaten meat since she was three years old, and Nan, the heroine of her children’s books, “sprang from that sensibility.” 

Wanting to “make sure the Sank was protected by humans from humans,” Agnes exhorts her best friend, Polly, to help preserve the sanctuary. Yet to do so means Polly must stand up to her husband as well as her oldest son, neither of whom Agnes likes. Agnes believes Polly is far too dedicated to Dick; she’s most comfortable “at his beck.” And Dick is all too comfortable with this arrangement, in which he is the center of Polly’s life. Polly admits she’s a “slightly afraid” of her son, James, who is not the child she expected him to be: “Truth be told, he wasn’t all that pleasant to be with.” She often sees the ghost of her “favorite child,” Lydia, and she half-wishes Dick could “see the ghost, too, so they could share Lydia again.” 

Yet Polly and Dick remain distant from each other, until Dick’s declining health loosens his mind and tongue and allows for their first bit of true connection. Meanwhile, Agnes gets a letter from Maud Silver, a new assistant to her editor; Maud wants Agnes to write a memoir that will tell the story behind her popular  When Nan  books, and Agnes wants nothing to do with it. 

Maud’s narrative adds another layer to the story of the women of Fellowship Point. In New York, Maud lives with her three-year-old daughter, Clemmie, and her mother, Heidi, who struggles with episodes of mania alternating with debilitating depression, which she calls “turning blue,” as she had throughout Maud’s childhood. Heidi’s past is mysterious and unknown, even to her; childhood trauma has wiped out her memory, and though she has days that are good enough to allow her to help care for Clemmie, every day is a struggle, for both mother and daughter. It was Heidi who’d introduced a young Maud to the  When Nan  books, which both women read to Clemmie as well, and Maud’s mission becomes getting Agnes to tell the world the truths behind her life and work. 

When she gets nowhere with Agnes on the memoir via their correspondence, Maud visits Fellowship Point, where she and Agnes form a quick bond, and while Agnes doesn’t change her mind, she eventually offers Maud a series of notebooks, in the form of letters to her late sister, that reveals the story of the real-life Nan, along with its joys and heartbreak.

In lovely, page-turning prose, the novel weaves together the stories of Agnes, Polly, and Maud, all charming, wise narrators whose instant friendships feel nearly magical. Yet no friendship is seamless—Maud and Agnes argue over the memoir until the end the novel, and tensions rise slowly, then explosively, between Agnes and Polly. Though Agnes usually keeps her thoughts about Dick to herself (“He was really such a small man,” Agnes believes, “so inconsequential, and without the sense to know it”), Polly has long dealt with eye rolls or sardonic comments from Agnes on her husband and other topics; for example, Polly doesn’t want to talk about volunteering to help animals with Agnes because she knows what Agnes would say: “ If you want to help animals, don’t eat them. They really appreciate that.  Polly could supply Agnes’s lines from afar.” Eventually they fall out, and a year-long silence follows.

At nearly 600 pages long, the novel’s the conservation theme disappears for quite a while—the story reveals loves and friendships, secrets and losses, the wisdom and indignities of aging—and amid these engaging human stories is the constant natural beauty of Fellowship Point. Even when the land trust isn’t at the forefront, the sense of place—and what it means to those who live there—comes through vividly. 

The novel addresses, seemingly tangentially at first, the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land long before, and it occasionally acknowledges the differences between the privileged Fellowship Point families and other residents, mostly through interactions with locals and their poorly treated dogs. Upon buying a starving, filthy puppy from an impoverished man on the side of the road, Agnes reflects: “I feel so saturated with Maine, but am so separate from its people.” 

Of course, all the advantages in the world can’t keep life’s realities at bay, whether accidents or illness or death. And the privilege of the Fellowship Point residents is tempered by the characters’ compassion, as well as their wit: When the family whose development company wants to turn the area into a resort and village crashes a party, they’re observed this way: “The Looses looked like a pack of bulldogs, all three squat and wide and panting. Who had comb marks in their hair in 2003? … Their pants were belted below their large, hard bellies. One wore white socks.”

The wise, warm, witty voices of the novel’s characters come together beautifully toward the book’s end, when the fate of Fellowship Point turns on a plot twist that feels shocking and inevitable at once. And, ultimately, the land’s future takes another turn entirely, one that was meant to be, and that should have been, all along. With its beautiful writing, natural setting, and deeply drawn characters,  Fellowship Point  is an absorbing, unforgettable, and fully engaging read.

Midge Raymond is a co-founder of Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of the novel My Last Continent and the award-winning short story collection Forgetting English . Her suspense novel, Devils Island , co-authored with John Yunker, is forthcoming from Oceanview Publishing in 2024, and her novel Floreana is forthcoming from Little A in 2025.

Username or Email Address

Remember Me

• Sign up and get a free ebook!
• Don't miss our $0.99 ebook deals!

Fellowship Point

• Unabridged Audio Download

Trade Paperback

LIST PRICE $20.00

Buy from Other Retailers

• Amazon logo
• Bookshop logo

Table of Contents

Reading group guide.

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! Plus, receive recommendations for your next Book Club read.

About The Author

Alice Elliott Dark is the author the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England , as well as two collections of short stories,  In the Gloaming  and  Naked to the Waist.  Her work has appeared in  The New Yorker ,  Harper’s ,  The New York Times ,  Best American Short Stories , and  O. Henry: Prize Stories , among others .  Her award-winning story  “ In the Gloaming” was made into two films and was chosen for inclusion in Best American Stories of the Century . Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an associate professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program.

Product Details

• Publisher: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books (May 9, 2023)
• Length: 608 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982131821

Browse Related Books

• Fiction > Sagas
• Fiction > Women

Related Articles

• Best of Summer Sweepstakes: A Chance to Win 8 Top Books - Off the Shelf
• The 10 Most Popular Books of July - Off the Shelf
• 10 Propulsive Books Christina Baker Kline Recommends - Off the Shelf
• 10 Literary Beach Reads to Activate Your Vacation Mode - Off the Shelf
• New in Paperback: 12 May Releases Begging for Some Sun - Off the Shelf
• 8 Timely Novels to Read this Earth Day - Off the Shelf
• 10 Books Mom Will Love This Mother’s Day - Off the Shelf
• 7 Books That Are Love Letters to Women - Off the Shelf
• 10 Long Books That Fly By - Off the Shelf
• 10 Books Capturing the Complexities of Enduring Friendships - Off the Shelf
• 6 Reflective Historical Novels That Explore Changing Eras - Off the Shelf
• Summer Most Anticipated: 25 New Books Coming in Hot - Off the Shelf

Raves and Reviews

"It is very much an epic read, a book for readers who want to settle in for a story at a near whopping 600 pages by the author of one of my favorite short stories ever, 'In the Gloaming.'" —John Searles, NYTimes -Bestselling Author of Strange but True , via The Today Show "5 Summer Reads You Won't Want to Put Down"

"A sweeping story of lifelong best friends...you will surely want to read this book. Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America." — Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Dark ( Think of England ) celebrates women’s friendships and artistic mentorship in this expansive yet intimate novel. The families and their grudges and grievances fill a broad canvas, and within it Dark delves deeply into the relationships between Agnes and her work, humans and the land, mothers and children, and, most indelibly, the sustenance and joy provided by a long-held female friendship. It’s a remarkable achievement.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

" Fellowship Point is a marvel. Intricately constructed, utterly unique, this novel set on the coast of Maine is filled with insights about writing, about the perils and freedoms of aging, about the great mysteries, as well as the pleasures, of life. The story about the relationships between three women unfolds, as life does, through joys and losses, confrontations and confessions, with twists along the way that change your perception of all that came before. This is a world is so closely and acutely observed that I felt I lived in it. I was sorry to leave." — Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"I can’t remember the last time I’ve fallen so hard for a book. Fellowship Point is about many things: friendship, secrets, legacy, love, family—but the true magic here is in the writing. Alice Elliott Dark has conjured a world so immersive I can still feel it in my bones. I mourned the finish, when I would have to leave behind the characters I grew to love. This captivating, unforgettable novel is thrillingly good.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of Nest and Good Company

" Fellowship Point is deeply relevant in its concerns—about the land, the creatures who inhabit it, and the legacies of ownership, stewardship, and friendship—but it’s also just a great, absorbing, and transformative read. Like a Maine glade, Dark’s book is filled with light." —Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days and In Zanesville

"I positively inhaled this novel--and then stingily meted out the last few pages, not wanting it to end. FELLOWSHIP POINT is a marvel--masterfully executed, beautifully layered, huge-hearted and sharp-witted--and Alice Elliott Dark is a writer of great empathy and incredible skill." —Claire Lombardo, New York Times Bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

“I fell into Fellowship Point --fell in step and in love with its characters, with its landscape, with its ideas about art and marriage and, above all, friendship. It's a beautifully passionate book about what it means to love a place and to love all the people of your life, and how life itself is a riveting plot and deep mystery.” —Elizabeth McCracken, New York Times bestselling author of Bowlaway and The Giant’s House

"Alice Elliott Dark is a writer I’ve long admired. With the splendid, engrossing Fellowship Point she has written a novel that is both sweeping and intimate as it deftly explores friendship, class, and the tricky nature of time." —Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings

“This is a virtuosic performance, indisputably a work of genius, but even fervent adjectives can’t capture the almost numinous effect of reading these pages. In Fellowship Point , one feels oneself in the rare presence of the truly sublime. Every exactingly described gesture, every bit of inspired characterization, every gorgeous sentence is run through an obsessive mind grappling indefatigably with the weightiest materials: the powerful gravity of enduring relationships and the psychic costs of managing them; the sometimes-crushing conflict between duty to self and responsibility to others; and the desperate urge to conserve a small corner of a stressed-out planet and defend a worthy way of life from extinction. The equal manner in which the past and present, like overlaid supersaturated transparencies, come so vividly to bloom in one book recalls the bottomless ambitions of the timeless greats—which is fitting, as Alice Elliott Dark is one of the best writers working in English today.” —Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

“I loved Fellowship Point so intensely and so tremendously, I’m struggling to find words that capture its brilliance. At once a rich, deeply felt investigation of female friendship and a bold novel of ideas, Fellowship Point offers the most profound pleasures. It reminded me of my favorite novels—those I return to, over and over— Great Expectations , Howards End , Middlemarch . I wanted to live inside it forever.” — Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

“I've just sat up nearly all night finishing Alice Dark's Fellowship Point . Dark took over a decade to craft this magnificent novel, and the result is an instant classic: an epic tale of love, family, friendship, literature, and the American landscape, laid out on the capacious scale of a nineteenth-century classic, yet effortlessly contemporary in its voice. Tracing her story over decades and generations, Dark offers a portrayal of the complex inner worlds of three extraordinary women with an unerring insight that rivals that of Edith Wharton, or Elena Ferrante. Replete with humor, irony, gimlet-eyed observation of social mores, and a deep underlying spirituality, it's a novel so immersive you don't just read it, but practically move into it, like one of the rambling, shingled summer "cottages" that come to life in its pages. We readers emerge at the end with a deep nostalgia for the wind-battered pines, lingering ghosts, and imperiled eagles' nests of Dark's unforgettable Maine coast.” — Andrea Lee, author of Red Island House

Resources and Downloads

High resolution images.

• Book Cover Image (jpg): Fellowship Point Trade Paperback 9781982131821

Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today!

Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster.

More books from this author: Alice Elliott Dark

You may also like: Thriller and Mystery Staff Picks

More to Explore

Limited Time eBook Deals

Check out this month's discounted reads.

Our Summer Reading Recommendations

Red-hot romances, poolside fiction, and blockbuster picks, oh my! Start reading the hottest books of the summer.

This Month's New Releases

From heart-pounding thrillers to poignant memoirs and everything in between, check out what's new this month.

Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love.

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

May 28, 2024

• Hanif Abdurraqib interviews Diane Seuss
• On a long tradition of civil disobedience at the City University of New York
• An interview with Paul Yamazaki

Fellowship Point

52 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Allice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point (2022) begins as an elderly woman’s quest to protect the Maine peninsula she loves (Fellowship Point) from development. As the novel unfolds, it showcases the friendship between this woman ( Agnes Lee ) and her lifelong companion (Polly Wister), who have spent summers together on the Point since their childhood. Coming of age at a time when roles for women were limiting, Agnes and Polly have taken separate paths but remained intensely connected to one another. As both women reckon with aging and life fulfillment, Agnes (the author of a children’s book series) is approached to write a memoir . In doing so, Agnes wrestles with divulging secrets she has kept hidden for decades.

Dark, the author of two novels and two short story collections, is best known for her award-winning short story “In the Gloaming” (1993), which was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century and adapted into two different films. That story, like Fellowship Point , tackles themes of illness and aging. Dark has also authored essays and reviews, appearing in publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post . She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark, where she teaches in the MFA program.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

• 7,750+ In-Depth Study Guides
• 4,800+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
• Downloadable PDFs

This guide references the 2022 hardcover edition of Fellowship Point by Scribner Books from Simon & Schuster.

Content Warning: The novel and this guide refer to depression, mental illness, and death by suicide as well as age-related cognitive decline and other health concerns.

The SuperSummary difference

• 8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
• Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
• 175 + new titles every month

Plot Summary

The novel opens as Agnes Lee, author of the When Nan children’s series, tries to begin a new novel, this one for a different series, called the Franklin Square books, which she authors under a pseudonym . In addition, Agnes convinces her friend, Polly Wister, to assist her in establishing a land trust for the property the two have inherited on Fellowship Point in Maine. Agnes is concerned that future development of the Point will diminish the habitat of the eagles and other wildlife dwelling there. Polly, whose husband, Dick Wister (a professor of philosophy), has just retired, agrees with Agnes. During the next several months, Polly neglects to present the idea outright to Dick (who she gleans will disagree), or share with Agnes that her son, James, disapproves of the idea. Meanwhile, Agnes undergoes a double mastectomy, which successfully removes cancerous cells. She continues to try to write during her summer stay at Leeward Cottage (her family’s home on Fellowship Point) but can’t find the inspiration to begin. In addition, she has received a letter from a young woman in the New York publishing industry named Maud Silver , who wants to Agnes to draft a memoir so that Maud might edit it. This nags at Agnes, who is unsure whether she really wants to write a memoir. Eventually, Agnes relents.

Polly’s husband, Dick, undergoes a mental decline. In the early morning hours, Polly finds him reminiscing about his youth and opening up in ways she has longed for during their entire marriage. Agnes finds Dick (who has always lived a life of letters) pompous, especially in the way he belittles Polly rather than encouraging her intellect. Polly has been content as a mother of three boys, though with the birth of each one, she longed for a daughter. She finally had a daughter, Lydia, but the girl died of an illness at age nine. Since then, Polly has mourned the loss of Lydia, whose ghost she’s certain she sees around the Point.

Agnes and Polly are both dismayed when Robert Circumstance , the caretaker of Fellowship Point, is accused of perpetrating theft at the home of Archie Lee, Agnes’s cousin. Robert is incarcerated for two years, during which he corresponds with Dick by letter. Dick, however, succumbs to dementia and passes away. When Polly learns of Robert’s correspondence with Dick, she begins writing to Robert herself, and their exchange continues for the duration of Robert’s prison term.

Agnes invites the editor she’s been corresponding with, Maud Silver, to stay at Leeward Cottage on Fellowship Point. Upon arriving, Maud immediately falls in love with the Point, relishing its natural beauty just as Agnes has. She and Agnes develop a professional friendship, engaging in daily discussions about literature and Agnes’s memoir. Maud is frustrated with the draft, certain that Agnes has intentionally omitted something important. She senses that there’s more to the story of the importance of Fellowship Point and the When Nan books. Maud’s time on the peninsula, however, is cut short when she must return to aid her mother, who has long experienced depression and mental illness and has now been hospitalized. Weeks after Maud leaves, the 9/11 attacks occur, and Agnes and Polly have a fight, after which they don’t speak to each other for months. Meanwhile, Agnes helps Maud obtain care for her mother, Heidi Silver, at the hospital in Philadelphia where Agnes has served as a board member. Maud then divides her time between Agnes’s Philadelphia apartment and her native Manhattan, where she raises her young daughter, Clemmie.

During this time, Agnes shares with Maud a series of notebooks containing writing that she completed in 1960. It consists of a series of letters to her deceased sister, Elspeth, which function as journal entries. In them, Agnes recounts becoming acquainted with Nan and Virgil Reed . Nan (the inspiration for the When Nan books) was the young daughter of Virgil, a relation of the Reed family, who owned a cottage on the Point. Virgil was reclusive and neglectful of young Nan, whom Agnes took under her wing and began caring for. Nan was seriously injured when she was pinned beneath a headstone in the cemetery , and this, coupled with Agnes’s reading Virgil’s published novel, drew the two together. A friendship developed wherein Virgil shared his writing in progress with Agnes, and she encouraged him. She came to believe that Virgil might be her soulmate but was dismayed when he and Karen, the young librarian who was tutoring Nan, announced their engagement. The same night, Virgil and Karen died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Nan was removed from the peninsula to live with relatives. A few years later, Agnes learned that Nan too had passed away.

As 2002 unfolds, Robert is released from prison and returns to Fellowship Point. Agnes and Polly resolve their argument and carry on as if nothing happened. Agnes shares with Polly her feelings about Virgil and agrees to meet with Maud again in an attempt to finally complete the memoir. When Maud arrives with her young daughter in tow, Agnes and Polly are shocked by how much she resembles Nan. They deduce that Heidi Silver, Maud’s mother, is Nan Reed. At the end of the summer, they bring Heidi to the peninsula, where she, Maud, Clemmie, Robert, and the others attend the annual summer’s-end party. Heidi’s memories slowly return. Agnes and Maud continue to work together, focusing on the final installment of the Franklin Square series, since Maud has deduced that Agnes is their author. Agnes comes to a decision about the ownership of Fellowship Point: It should be returned to the Indigenous Wabanaki peoples, many of whom still inhabit the area. She explains this in a letter to Polly, who has just passed away.

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Featured Collections

View Collection

Books & Literature

Contemporary Books on Social Justice

Health & Medicine

Historical Fiction

Mental Illness

Mortality & Death

National Suicide Prevention Month

Popular Study Guides

The Best of "Best Book" Lists

Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love

Similar to The Book Review

1 The Sword and Laser

Tom merritt and veronica belmont, 1 i should be writing, mur lafferty, 1 ifanboy - comic books, 1 comic geek speak podcast - the best comic book podcast, speakers of geek, 1 small town horror, 1 missing pages, the podglomerate, 1 the new yorker: poetry, wnyc studios and the new yorker, 1 helping writers become authors, k.m. weiland, 1 lens shark photography podcast, sharky james, 1 picture this: photography podcast, tony & chelsea northrup, podcasts worth a listen, the book review « » alice elliott dark on ‘fellowship point’.

In Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel, “Fellowship Point,” Agnes Lee and Polly Wister have been friends for about 80 years. Their intertwined families own homes on a Maine peninsula, and some of the book’s drama stems from their efforts to preserve the land and keep it out of the hands of developers.

“The issue of land, land ownership, land conservation has always been of deep interest to me,” Dark says on this week’s podcast. “I came to that pretty quickly as I was developing this story. I decided I wanted to write something like a 19th-century-style novel, and I wanted to have it be modern. Women didn’t own land in the 19th century. They didn’t make decisions about land, even if they did own it, and having women landowners dealing with these issues seemed to me a modern version of a big, older, 19th-century-type novel.”

Katherine Chen visits the podcast to discuss her new novel, “Joan,” which imagines Joan of Arc as a born fighter who becomes an avenging warrior.

“I think the central image that keeps us fascinated with Joan of Arc all these years later is the mental image of a woman in armor on horseback going to war,” Chen says. “I think that image keeps us enthralled to this day because it’s as startling and surprising as it is empowering.” We also remain captivated, Chen says, by the “sheer improbability” of Joan’s story.

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news about librarians caught in the culture war over banned books ; and Elisabeth Egan and MJ Franklin talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Everything I Need I Get From You” by Kaitlyn Tiffany

“Thank You For Listening” by Julia Whelan

“A Word Child” by Iris Murdoch

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

488 episodes

Alice Elliott Dark on ‘Fellowship Point’

The Book Review

508 subscribers

published 2y ago

All episodes

Welcome to player fm.

Player FM is scanning the web for high-quality podcasts for you to enjoy right now. It's the best podcast app and works on Android, iPhone, and the web. Signup to sync subscriptions across devices.

Quick Reference Guide

The Book Report Network

• Bookreporter
• ReadingGroupGuides
• AuthorsOnTheWeb

Sign up for our newsletters!

Find a Guide

For book groups, what's your book group reading this month, favorite monthly lists & picks, most requested guides of 2023, when no discussion guide available, starting a reading group, running a book group, choosing what to read, tips for book clubs, books about reading groups, coming soon, new in paperback, write to us, frequently asked questions.

• Request a Guide

Advertise with Us

Add your guide, you are here:, fellowship point.

• About the Book

The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century.

Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy --- to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels, and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly.

Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband and philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons. But what is it that Polly wants herself?

Agnes’ designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’ resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.

FELLOWSHIP POINT reads like a classic 19th-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores --- a deep and empathic interest in women’s lives, the class differences that divide us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, a reckoning with intimacy, history and posterity. It is a masterwork from Alice Elliott Dark.

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark

• Publication Date: May 9, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books
• ISBN-10: 1982131829
• ISBN-13: 9781982131821

• How to Add a Guide
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Newsletters

Copyright © 2024 The Book Report, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } $27.00 $ 27 . 00 FREE delivery Saturday, June 1 on your first order Ships from: Amazon.ca Sold by: Amazon.ca

Save with used - very good .savingpriceoverride { color:#cc0c39important; font-weight: 300important; } .reinventmobileheaderprice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricesavingspercentagemargin, #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricepricetopaymargin { margin-right: 4px; } $21.33 $ 21 . 33 free delivery june 11 - 21 ships from: thriftbooks-reno us sold by: thriftbooks-reno us.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video, download Flash Player

Follow the author

Fellowship Point: A Novel Paperback – May 9 2023

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 608 pages
• Language English
• Publication date May 9 2023
• Dimensions 13.34 x 4.06 x 20.32 cm
• ISBN-10 1982131829
• ISBN-13 978-1982131821
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

From the Publisher

Product description

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books (May 9 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 608 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982131829
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982131821
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 454 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.34 x 4.06 x 20.32 cm
• #520 in Stories of Friendship
• #3,332 in Contemporary Fantasy (Books)
• #4,364 in Family Saga

About the author

Alice elliott dark.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and translated into many languages. "In the Gloaming," a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her non-fiction reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many anthologies.

Customer reviews

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon and Our Planet
• Investor Relations
• Press Releases
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• Amazon.ca Rewards Mastercard
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon Cash
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns Are Easy
• Manage your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Customer Service
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Interest-Based Ads
• Amazon.com.ca ULC | 40 King Street W 47th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5H 3Y2 |1-877-586-3230

Advertisement

Supported by

editors’ choice

6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

• Share full article

Monday is Memorial Day, when Americans pause to remember those who have lost their lives in the country’s wars, and if that somber occasion puts you in the mood to think about global politics and foreign policy, this would be a good weekend to settle in with “New Cold Wars,” in which my Times colleague David E. Sanger and his collaborator Mary K. Brooks evaluate the current state of tensions among China, Russia and America.

Elsewhere, we also recommend new fiction from Colm Tóibín, Juli Min and Monica Wood, along with a biography of the groundbreaking transgender actress Candy Darling and a book of photos by the incomparable Corky Lee, documenting moments in Asian American life. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

NEW COLD WARS: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks

In this compelling first draft of history, Sanger reveals how a generation of American officials have grappled with dangerous developments in great war competition, from the war in Ukraine to the technological arms race with China.

“Vividly captures the view from Washington. But, as Sanger makes clear, … the fate of the U.S.-led order rests more than ever on the ideas, beliefs and emotions of people far outside the Beltway.”

From Justin Vogt’s review

Crown | $33

LONG ISLAND Colm Tóibín

More than a decade after Tóibín introduced us to Eilis Lacey, the finely wrought Irish émigré heroine of his novel “Brooklyn,” he’s conjured her again, this time as a married mother whose suburban New York life is disrupted by a crisis that propels her back to Ireland once more.

“Eilis is hardly passive. She is an interesting and vivid character because she manages to make her destiny her choice. … In her own mind, and in the eyes of sympathetic readers, she is free.”

From A.O. Scott’s review

Scribner | $28

SHANGHAILANDERS Juli Min

Min’s debut is a sweeping story, told in reverse. The novel opens in 2040 with the Yangs, a wealthy family tense with frustrations and troubles. Then the novel gradually moves backward to 2014, revealing along the way the complex lives of each family member and how they got to their anguished present.

“Having knowledge of these characters’ futures before we know about their past makes stumbling on their bygone days all the more touching.”

From Jean Kwok’s review

Spiegel & Grau | $28

HOW TO READ A BOOK Monica Wood

The latest from Wood (“When We Were the Kennedys”) brings together three lonely people in and around Portland, Maine — a retired teacher, a widower and a young woman recently released from prison — for a dextrous and warmhearted tale of unlikely redemption and connection.

“A charming, openhearted novel, deceptively easy to read but layered with sharp observations, hard truths and rich ideas.”

From Helen Simonson’s review

Mariner | $28

CANDY DARLING: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar Cynthia Carr

Carr, an astute guide to the Manhattan demimonde, offers a compassionate and meticulous biography of the transgender actress, who flitted in and out of Andy Warhol’s orbit before dying of cancer at 29 in 1974, after being immortalized in a famous photograph by Peter Hujar and in the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side.”

“There wasn’t really vocabulary to describe the territory Darling was exploring back then … and her biographer extends a sure hand across the breach. To push her from the Warhol wings to center stage, at a moment when transgender rights are in roiling flux, just makes sense.”

From Alexandra Jacobs’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $30

CORKY LEE’S ASIAN AMERICA: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice Photographs Corky Lee; edited by Chee Wang Ng and Mae Ngai

Several years after his death from Covid at age 73, the famed photographer’s work remains enduringly relevant. This new book, a sort of survey course in Asian Americans’ decades-long fight for social and political equality, offers both intimate, atomized portraits of the everyday and galvanizing visions of a larger unified movement.

“A man with an intimate understanding of the invisible, turning his lens on behind-the-scenes fragments and people that the annals of history have largely ignored.”

From Wilson Wong’s review

Clarkson Potter | $50

Fellowship Application FAQs

Hi Everyone,

Fellowship application season is here, so this morning I’m going to tackle FAQs for current and future candidates.

What do fellowships look for? Programs want candidates who will work hard and contribute to their program. They seek fellows with the potential to become faculty. Selection committees look for evidence of clinical excellence, scholarship, citizenship, and interpersonal skills- emotional intelligence, professionalism, willingness to work hard, reliability, and kindness.

Am I competitive? You’re all competitive, but you need to match your interests with the right program. Some programs seek physician scientists, so if your focus is education, you may need to look elsewhere. Some specialties are especially competitive—particularly GI, cardiology, and heme-Onc—and the most sought after programs seek candidates with deep research and leadership portfolios. Faculty and residency leadership are here to guide you.

Where should I apply? Focus on programs that meet your professional and personal needs. Compared to residencies, which generally offer strong, broad education, fellowships often vary in their specific strengths. For example, some PCCSM programs are leaders in asthma or global health, while others are known for excellence in critical care, ILD, or sleep.* For more information, you should tap into the expertise of Yale faculty as well as alumni, who have trained throughout the country. Be sure to consider geography, particularly if you have a partner with work restrictions or you wish to train near family.

How many programs should I apply to? The answer varies by applicant and specialty, but considerations include specialty competitiveness, geographic restrictions, and whether you’re applying as a couple. You should only apply to programs that you’re sincerely considering. If your application has glitches (e.g., lower USMLEs, less scholarship, clinical struggles), you should include less competitive programs on your list. Many applicants get more interview invitations than they can accept. For candidates applying to competitive fields, 10-12 interviews should be enough.

Do I need to plan for coverage during interview season? Yes. By now, you should already have requested a non-backup elective and/or vacation during late summer or early fall. We will provide you with backup for one day during interview season if you have to interview while on a clinical rotation. For additional coverage, you will need to arrange swaps with colleagues.

How many letter writers do I need? Check fellowship websites for instructions, but most programs want four: a program director’s letter, a clinical letter in your specialty, a scholarship letter (e.g., from Research-in-Residency, a Quality Improvement Project, or a Distinction Project), and a wildcard. The latter will usually be a second clinical letter, for example from a longitudinal outpatient experience to complement an inpatient letter. You may also consider a second research letter if you’re applying to research-focused programs.

Who should I ask to write a letter: Ask faculty who know you well. Although letters are confidential, your MedHub evaluations will give you a sense of what would go into your recommendation. If you haven’t asked for letters yet, do it now. Once a faculty member agrees to write a letter, send them your CV, a draft of your personal statement, and an offer to meet with them to discuss your plans (not all letter writers need to meet with you, but it doesn’t hurt to ask). Get letter writers the information they need from ERAS to upload letters and let them know the deadlines.

What’s included in the program director’s letter? My letters are written according to APDIM guidelines (see the attached template). The letter provides information about our residency; assesses your clinical performance, medical knowledge, teaching ability, professionalism, and communication skills; highlights your scholarship and extracurricular contributions; and ends with an assessment of your fellowship potential.

How important is the personal statement? Very (see my prior Program Director’s Notes on this topic). Aim to excite fellowship directors about your candidacy: What drew you to the specialty? How do your past experiences show your potential? What do you hope to gain from training? What do you seek in a program? How do you hope to contribute to the field? What do you see yourself doing after training?

Should I apply this year? Hmm. Many residents apply at the end of their PGY2 year, but there are no rules. A Chief year can offer clinical and leadership experience and bolster any application. Experience as a hospitalist or primary care physician can add to your clinical maturity (I spent a year as an emergency medicine physician before fellowship). Waiting a year or two can give you more research and leadership opportunities as well as more time to decide which field to pursue. After spending time as a hospitalist or primary care physician, many graduates learn that general internal medicine is their true calling. The bottom line is you can apply now if you’re ready, but there’s no rush.

What do I do now? Good question. If you’re applying this year:

• Tell me, so I can start working on your letter. With 30+ letters to write, I need to start.
• Send me your CV and “talking points” to highlight in your PD letter.
• Send me a draft of your personal statement, which I’ll gladly review.
• Attend Fellowship Application Night this Wednesday, May 22 at 6:30P in Fitkin Amphitheater, hosted by Dr. Gupta. Fellowship Directors will be sharing their advice and I’ll be zooming in from Nova Scotia.
• Identify and confirm letter writers.
• Check ERAS’s website for deadlines. Note: it can take up to five business days to process uploaded materials, so don’t wait for the last minute!

If you have more questions, ask away. You’re a talented group and we’re going to have another successful year.

Enjoy your Sunday, everyone. Today, I’ll be driving to Nova Scotia for one more week of retreat.

*IMHO, Yale PCCSM is strong in all these areas... 😊

P.S. What I’m reading:

• As Bird Flu Looms, the Lessons of Past Pandemics Take On New Urgency
• How to Create a Society That Prizes Decency
• From the Embers of an Old Genocide, a New One May Be Emerging
• God’s Doctors

P.P.S. Acadia Pics:

Featured in this article

• Mark David Siegel, MD Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary); Program Director, Internal Medicine Traditional Residency Program

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Literature & Fiction

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Audiobook Price: $20.66 $20.66

Save: $7.67 $7.67 (37%)

Buy for others

Buying and sending ebooks to others.

• Select quantity
• Buy and send eBooks
• Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Fellowship Point: A Novel Kindle Edition

• Print length 586 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
• Publication date July 5, 2022
• File size 2406 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09841YCLV
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books (July 5, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 5, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 2406 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 586 pages
• #136 in Women's Sagas
• #305 in Friendship Fiction (Kindle Store)
• #306 in Women's Literary Fiction

About the author

Alice elliott dark.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and translated into many languages. "In the Gloaming," a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her non-fiction reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many anthologies.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

Report an issue

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Advertisement

New books by nicolette polek, honor levy, and tracy fuad, the review’s review.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Mural at the Amargosa Opera House. Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Gia wants to disappear. This is an ordinary desire while in pain. In moments of hardship, it is tempting to admire the ascetic. The imagined glory of solitude is that our inner life will become a source of endless pleasure. Of course, this is fiction. Everyone is touched by loneliness, while alone and in company. To bear it, we must find something from beyond to sustain us. This is what Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera seeks.

Polek’s debut novel, published last month by Graywolf, shows us the mechanics of a mind negotiating a rupture. It’s easy to say that Bitter Water Opera is about a breakup, but that would be a narrow view. As in real life, the relationship comes undone downstream from a more preeminent but obscured event in the emotional life of one or both parties. Gia’s relationship seems fine. It is sparsely characterized, mostly through memories of excursions dotted with palms and bougainvillea. But for Gia, this pleasantness is intolerable. She starts acting erratically, flirting with strangers. Soon after, she leaves both him and her post in a university film department. Her mental state is vague, made up of a loose association of memories, summoning trinket-like facts, like “the prevalent tone in nature is the key of E.” She has traded a life in exchange for something she has not yet learned to want. But what is to be done when desire turns its cheek to you? What is there to want when you’ve stopped wanting what you wanted? In the absence of wanting, it is helpful to find a human example to follow, try to insinuate yourself in their map of desire and its attendant habits.

Through the figure of the dancer and choreographer Marta Becket, Gia tries to summon a model for a life she could find agreeable. “Marta got through without needing, grieving, or waiting on someone, and now, after death, I was her witness, hoping that she, in some act of imitation on my part, could fix my life.” Becket was a real woman who abandoned her life as a ballerina in New York in favor of the oblivion of Death Valley, where she dedicated herself to running a previously abandoned recreation hall to showcase her one-woman plays and ballets. At the Amargosa Opera House, Becket performed her own choreography for nearly fifty years. In the early days, her only audience members were the faces of heroes and loved ones that she had painted into the trompe l’oeil mezzanines, from which they permanently applauded. Her husband, Polek writes, was off with the prostitutes in town, trying to withstand the fact that Marta did not need him. Eventually she became a cult figure, luring crowds, the press, and lost women like Gia into her orbit, even after death.

After Gia writes her a letter, the ghost of Marta enters Gia’s life, and with her a flurry of activity. The pair have full days together: painting, picknicking, hiking. For a while Gia pantomimes Marta’s actions, but it soon becomes evident that she is not yet ready to stand up to the task of living (she attempts to get back together with her ex-boyfriend). The ghost of Marta exits, taking her watercolors with her. Gia descends into catatonia. Towards the middle of the novel, Gia looks out over the pond outside a house in the country where she’s staying alone and sees the floating corpse of a dead deer. This visceral encounter with a rotting animal draws Gia out of the misty, desultory realm she has lived in for so long and forces her to contend with the bare facts of nature, and the nature of herself: she does not live the life of an embodied subject. Her central problem is her tendency for “limerence,” as she calls it, which leaves her chronically unable to connect with the present. But this insight is brief, and an epiphany does not cohere. “The smell faded for good, and with it my revelation.” Here she is confronted with the mystery of herself: something has peeked out from the curtain behind which her mind stages a secret play. It is a glimpse at something that will eventually be revealed in full, but she must wait. Insight tends to come soon after we are emptied out completely. As the epigraph notes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

—Hayley J. Clark

Being more “connected” than ever to the world, there can be a strange sensation in trying to determine where we end and where everything else begins. As Tracy Fuad writes in her powerful new book Portal , “I have imagined / The rootlets / Of new nerves / Extending / To carry sensation / Back to the crescent / Of numbness / Above the line / That marks the boundary / Of no dimension / In between us.” Life’s events are bizarre, but at the same time all too ordinary: they might be stalking an ex online (who has deleted the photos of you together), the contortions of learning a new language, or even the sensation of pregnancy. Fuad is the poet of this porous feeling, and she follows the tides of that ever-changing boundary. This condition, both banal and terrifyingly expansive, is addressed in a poem cleverly titled “Hyposubject”: “How do you feel when the world is big inside your head? // Another common moment.” What’s common can be elusive—we can forget how strange what we’re doing is—but then it proves to be a source of shared strength, if effort is taken to open its hidden possibilities.

This transformation of the everyday has much to do with the clarity of Fuad’s forms, which range widely but fit together seamlessly in the book’s structure: the long unspooling of short lines down the page in a ribbon, the single-line monostitches that open up space on the page and test each declaration. Together, they make a theme of the difficulty of managing discrete information, the struggle to find form within flux. Fuad’s excellent poem “ Birth ” was published in this magazine, but it’s the shortest poem in Portal —to me, one of Fuad’s great strengths is the mid-length lyric. Although she is capable of marvelous compression and precision (“After the storm, I step on a buried bird at the beach. Soft as a loaf of bread.”), the longer poems are true to the book’s title, which I think conveys a spirit of dilation. Once the portal is open, the poet must remain open to connections and continuations. At the same time, Fuad keeps her subjects clear and focused, from a meditation on German business customs and its language to a poem about the varieties of edible acorn on Cape Cod. Although the screen is always just a glance away, Fuad doesn’t feel bound to it—inch by inch, pixel by pixel, the poet’s attention recovers its agency. Nor is Fuad trapped in her first-person subjectivity—a stunning, more abstract sonnet sequence anchors the book, forging surprising intimacies from some of the book’s most “difficult” language.

Many writers either pretend that the phone glued to the hand doesn’t exist or are subsumed by it, mirroring its frantic language. Fuad finds a synthesis that is neither an evasion nor a surrender. As she writes, “When the self finally appears, don’t turn the self away.” With its inventive, precise language, Portal makes clarity from noise.

—David Schurman Wallace

Most twelve-year-olds online today have the kind of intuition for the infinite plasticity of word and image that you used to have to study semiotics to acquire. This is why we’re living through a Cambrian explosion of linguistic creativity; it’s also why Twitter eventually makes you feel like words are meaningless, and like you are dead or “deconstructed.” What makes Honor Levy the voice of a generation is her ability to take all those floating signifiers and dead metaphors, all these junk-bits of content rendered inert by their repetition—on Reddit, on Tumblr, in Shakespeare—and give them new life; in other words, meaning. And she makes it look easy! At their best, Levy’s sentences hopscotch through intricate sequences of signs with perfect control and infectious glee; all you want to do is sit back and watch them play. My favorite piece in her new collection My First Book is an otherwise traditional short story composed almost entirely of cultural references, and a virtuosic example of this sense for rhythm and quotation: “She’d stare up at him with her shining anime, no her shining animal eyes, her real eyes, realize real lies. Wondering what he was thinking. He’d stare into them and then he’d sit beside her, very close, take a breath and say, Damn Bitch, You Live Like This? like Max to Roxanne from A Goofy Movie (1995) from the meme (2016). They would smile. There would be butterflies.”

The story being told here is a tale as old as time: boy meets girl—except online. The simplicity of this conceit belies the beauty and intelligence of its execution. Like Instagram, and like one of the oldest scraps of internet syntax I personally remember, it’s so meta : “Love Story” shows us how the love story is itself a meme—the original one. “Odysseus and Penelope, Eloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Bella and Edward,” as Levy’s story goes. Their love is why we’re here, and their stories are why we fall in love. And Levy’s unnamed Zoomer Romeo and Juliet are acutely aware of this: their status as characters and images, as memes and as (thanks to xenoestrogens, diminishingly viable) genes, and the melancholy this can produce. Deep in her “Ophelia era,” she has to remind herself of her actual existence: “That is my body on the screen there. This is my body on the bed here.” Sometimes, when you know you’re just a vessel , you feel really empty. As the Wikipedia page for Metameme states, “It has been proposed that the degree of consciousness a society has about the very memes that form it is correlated with how evolved that society is,” and sometimes, knowing you’re at the brain-expanding final stage of humanity isn’t so fun. A “Withered Wojak,” he feels “depopulation, doom, the sun setting for the last time ever, a great ugliness, the end of history flashing before his eyes.” (These low points come after a poorly received nude.) A less courageous and more cynical writer, perhaps someone working on Euphoria , might have left the romance at that: poor alienated fucked-up Zoomers. But Levy knows we’re so lucky to see “all of the ends and the beginnings beginning and ending and beginning and ending and beginning and ending infinitely.” And our generation is lucky to have a voice that gives us a happy ending, or, at least, a happy way to end. <3

— Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor