A Manual For How To Love Us

A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women's grief - offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.

In these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honouring the feral in all of us. Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, it spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge.

In each story, grieving women embrace their wildest impulses as they attempt to master their lives: one woman becomes a "gazer" at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, a couple speaks only their basement's black box, and a throuple must decide what to do when one partner disappears.

Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, A Manual For How To Love Us is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss.