“Perfectly captures a generation’s dislocated vibe.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“[A] fast-paced debut novel . . . [that] asks what it really means for people to define themselves.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A mesmerizing, incandescent novel by a writer of seemingly limitless ability. I read it with my heart beating at a different register because I knew I was in the presence of a writer who knows how to match an acrobatic and singular use of language to the density of human complexity. Gallagher enlivens worlds and characters with an observational eye and ear tuned to frequencies most of us don't see and hear.”
—Marisa Silver, author of The Mysteries and Mary Coin
“Who You Might Be is a brilliant, splintery coming-of-age novel that perfectly captures the nervous thrum of adolescence and the unnerving fragility of adulthood. Gallagher is so acutely attuned to the lies (and secrets) we tell (and keep from) ourselves and others. A dazzling debut that puts me in mind of Emma Cline and Rachel Kushner.”
—Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
Paperback release, June, 2023
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
To the Stranger Who Returned My LOst Notebook
On the icy sidewalk, I borrowed B’s phone to cancel my bank cards. There was no number I could call to cancel my journal.
On losing—and recovering—an archive of feeling. Lit Hub, 2022.
Night Reading
The product of a three-night reading residency in the former Bowery apartment of artist Eva Hesse (facilitated by dispersed holdings) “Night Reading” is an essay in the anthology Reading Room, edited by David Richardson and published by dispersed holdings, New York, 2020.
Taking her initial proposal letter as its starting point, Gallagher’s essay combines documentary, personal narrative, and borrowed text to considers relationships between reading and writing, sleeping and wakefulness, present and memory. Reading Room was named one of the 20 Best Art Books of 2020 by the Brooklyn Rail.
The Extraterrestrial
The magpies chatter like babies or television. All her life they’ve creeped her out (their bad impressions, their dark, dark blues), but lately she’s starting to listen.
Short story, published in the Beloit Fiction Journal (Vol. 32) and the runner-up for the 2019 Hamlin Garland Award.
Night on the Island
When I come home, she is filing her toenails at the table, her eyes sparkling and hollow and possessed by something half-god, half-demon. “It’s amazing how much weight you can lose when all you want to eat is someone who isn’t around.”
Short story, recorded at Yee Siang Dumplings in Ypsilanti, Michigan, 2017, for the Ditto Ditto Recorded Reading Archive.
Fragments of a Season cover image by Luigi Ghirri
Fragments of a Season
For a long time now her days had followed an unforgiving pattern (city life!) that made her feel like she was forever opening a book, reading a page, growing bored, closing the book.
Ideally read in conjunction with at-home listening, “Fragments of a Season” is a short story appearing in the liner notes of the album of the same title, by Alexis Georgopoulos and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma (Emotional Response, London, 2017).
“A pensive tale that leads from a crowded city to an unnamed Mediterranean island where olive trees dot the landscape, goats roam wild, and sex and melancholy go hand in hand.”
—Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork
Go Into the Room is a nine-part prose exploration of the paintings of Paul Wackers, appearing in the catalogue You Are Welcome Here, published by Alice Gallery, Brussels, 2017.
GO INTO THE ROOM
Go into the room. It’s easy, you have a key. This is the room of a person you’ve long been close to and have long wanted to be closer to, though something in this person’s manner—the way they look away while speaking, the way they hesitate with their hands—solidifies your distance. You are a part of the world, and the world is a thing to be kept at bay.
SOME FACES
Collaborative print set includes handwritten text by Gallagher and images by Paul Wackers. Risograph, thirty-two pages, edition of 35. Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco, 2017.
TOPEKA
Kansas makes a grainy square around us. In the passenger seat, Robert faces the winter fields mounding along the highway like a sad brown sea. I sense him feeling his way toward the sun. Sometimes he’s this to me, a plant on a sill; other times he’s my husband again.
A short story contribution to American C, in which photographers and writers respond to a collection of found photographs dating from the first half of the 20th Century. Part of the four-volume anthology American A, B, C, D, published by Paripé Books, Spain/Argentina, 2017.
Playing & Reality
Cecilia had in fact been his only romance, he had confessed to me, in that way that indicated he had long ago taken ownership of this abnormality, and Cecilia, in her singleness, had become ‘the one’ . . . a refusal of substitutes had become a permanent feature in his character.
Collaborative print set inspired by the eponymously-titled book by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. Three fictional case studies interspersed with cribbed Winnicott fragments (Gallagher), and five ink-wash collages (Paul Wackers) explore transitional phenomena and human-object relationships.
Set contains five double-sided posters sleeved in a hand-stamped folder. Offset printing, 11 x 17, signed edition of 100.
THE Mime
“A mime walks into a bar,” the bartender says, and leaves it there, unfinished. “Then what?” the mime asks. The bartender shrugs, looks embarrassed, walks away. He seemed to think the mime would finish the joke, or at least remain silent.
The Caveman
If I were a caveman I think I’d be the one still living at home, still living in my mother’s cave until my cave mother and cave father, fucking like donkeys in their furry bed, grunt one day that it’s time I go—my rotting teeth are a liability for them; I’m eating through the winter stores of buffalo jerky, acorn mush. It’s time for tough, prelingual love.
Short stories, part of the prose series Masks, and published in Salt Hill (Vol. 36), Syracuse University.
Christopher Lux, St. Christopher (the skins)