Inside/Out by Joseph Osmundson

Inside/Out by Joseph Osmundson

I wish I'd had this book when I was 22 and making mistakes all over the world. I might have made fewer, might have made more, but I might have loved myself better the whole time. Bold, wise, percussive delight--Joseph Osmundson brings to the page the candor of the empty bed, and the full one, too. Inside/Out is like if Maggie Nelson had written Bluets about fucking men.

- Alexander Chee, author of Queen of the Night, a New York Times Editors' Choice

In tracking an obsessive relationship that treads the devastating line between dysfunction and abuse, Joseph Osmundson explores how vulnerability, need, and shame echo across a life, and meditates on the complexities, both emotional and ethical, of writing that life. Inside/Out is a beautiful and brave book.

- Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016

Joseph Osmundson's Inside/Out is a haunting meditation on longing and making sense of lost love through the lens of a perpetual outsider. Osmundson explores what it means to have our physical body betray our psychic one, to have our silences and misdeeds recorded long after what has transpired, to have, finally, found our way outside.

- Tanwi Nandini Islam, author of Bright Lines

I don't know that there is a writer in this country doing as much with queer theory, narrative momentum, whiteness, sexual identity, and the literal outside as Joseph Osmundson. Somehow, while welcoming readers into so many folds of his life, he manages to obliterate spectacle and really demands we ask ourselves who and what we are, and who and what we want to hide, from the inside out.

- Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division