But as he explores the cuckolding lifestyle, he finds himself tugging at threads that threaten to unravel his marriage, his town, and himself. With empathy and humor, debut author Jackie Ess crafts a kaleidoscopic meditation on marriage, manhood, dreams, basketball, sobriety, and the secret lives of Oregonians.
Jackie Ess writes the feeling of being on the edge of a revelation better than anybody Ive ever read. In her novel, the titular character, Darryl, narrates his adventure into the cuckolding lifestyle in short blog posts full of introspection and the sort of questions that lead you to realize that the life you have isnt the one you want. It reminded me of nothing so much as my own early fumbling toward transition. Alternately meditative and razor-sharp, absurd and painfully real; Darryl probably isnt the transgender novel you thought you wanted but it is the one this moment calls for. Ben Lenk, digital production engineer, Digital Media, NPR
This is a brilliant and hilarious satire of selfhood and desire that tracks the tangled mess of identity formation in a world saturated with definitions Ess captures the thorny overlaps between male friendship, love, competition, and lust to create an unforgettable portrait of the men who know too easily how to be men and the men desperate to figure it out.Alex McElroy, Buzzfeed News
Darryl introduces a genuinely novel figure: a chaos-agent who is at every turn a loser, on whom the world continually puts one over, but whose very passivity is explosively charged. Dominic Fox, Review31
Reading Darryl is certainly somewhat of an acid trip, walking through internet culture reflected back in ways that vacillate between cruelty and tenderness." Grace Byron, Observer
It brushes up against Dennis Coopers The Sluts, one of the most daring unreliably narrated novels in recent history, making that world of hustlers and the men who review them on messageboards close enough to touch. This novel uses a deadpan, reasonable, low-key tone to explore utterly unhinged concepts, wholly deranged rationales, in a dizzying whirl of subcultures and ideals and catastrophic decisions and their consequences.Kyle Lukoff, Lambda Literary
