Louise Wareham evokes the mystery of sexual compulsion with stunning honesty and quiet compassion. She captures the wry and brilliant humor of Betsy Scott, her core of tensile courage, so that we can bear to witness her life, so that we can keep our faith as she enters chaos to seek redemption. In the fragments of a fractured life, in stark and radiant images, Louise Wareham recovers miraculous beauty, a fragile stained glass vision of one woman's whole and luminous spirit.--Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweet Hearts
Louise Wareham's debut novel is a work of staggering intensity, written in a deceptively straight-forward, no-nonsense prose, which belies the vast iceberg of unexplored pain that lurks just below its surface.--Kaylie Jones, author of Speak Now and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
Louise Wareham's keyed-down style amplifies the threat in the sexual terrain her narrator travels. She conveys the disequilibrium a young woman sustains in a run of soul-honing liaisons. 'He saw I had been through something. And it was something that would serve him'--that the young narrator sees this and LIKES this in a man is the kind of charged and startling observation that powers this striking novel.--Amy Hempel, author of Reasons to Live
The truly important novel, as Tolstoi so passionately averred, is the adventure of a question; and the question, most often, is unhappiness. Ranging inward to a psyche's unsettled relation to itself, and out into the wilderness of family and love, Louise Wareham's Since You Ask is a sustained and sustaining adventure, passionate as Tolstoi would approve. Reading this novel, I saw the substance (and substances) of unhappiness transformed into something even brighter than courage. This is a splendid debut.--Donald Revell, author of Arcady