Still Alive
A hero's journey through a dying empire. On the Road for a beaten generation. After V meets Lex, a butch painter, at an underground punk show, they enter a multi-year relationship that ranges from Portland, Oregon, to New York City, and finally Los Angeles, with V's family of origin ever interjecting with dysfunction and neediness. Her brother has retreated into a hodgepodge of Eastern religiosity and their mother's addictions are worsening. Meanwhile her father is busy building a new family, as sunny as V's childhood was grim. Leroy, V's gay best friend, has chosen rural peace, but V can't find the same satisfaction - anywhere. Ever in search of love, meaning, and temp work, V hurtles across the US, resisting the store-bought narratives of mainstream life to create a freedom all her own.
With heady pacing, a recursive structure, and sharp prose, STILL ALIVE renders the much-maligned adult millennial experience with affection and profundity. In this story, as in life, there's no cure for living.
This is what it's like when, sometime between getting out of bed and returning to it, you encounter a work of art. This is what it's like when someone else's truth reads like your own. This is what it's like to feel less alone.
-Guillermo Stitch, author of Lake of Urine
This is a book for wanderers and searchers, a love story with all of the attendant cliches wadded into a ball and tossed overboard. LJ Pemberton has written a quarter-life raft for the dissatisfied and unmoored. Still Alive is punch-drunk and furious, listless and wondrous, brilliantly funny and sexy as hell. I devoured it.
-Hilary Leichter, author of Temporary and Terrace Story
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"A peripatetic and promiscuous young woman seeks her life's meaning in [this] fresh and vivid debut...Throughout, V's desire is made palpable via Pemberton's aching prose...It's a piquant coming-of-age novel for late-blooming romantics." -Publishers Weekly
"...an impressionist interrogation of a valiant effort to forge a singular existence in an era of empty consumerism and vapid online life...There is heartache and beauty all throughout this novel...I keep thinking of Still Alive as a queer Fight Club (1996) for the millennial generation...If Fight Club touted moralistic dogma and material deprivation as a path to liberation, Still Alive laughs in the face of such naïve confidence in easy solutions." -Full Stop
"It's a coming of age story, and there's some love in there as well, but in the end, it's really a story of self-love, a story of craving freedom and finding it within instead of without, and a story of coming home to yourself." -Independent Book Review
"Superb and thought-provoking" -Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies
"Set to the speed of life, by which I don't mean first lust, heartbreak, and reckoning with one's parents, though it certainly has all those. I mean the Ben Gay, Haagen-Dazs, maxed-out credit, and nerwork television that is the real sum of our experience as upright animals. Everything is realism if it works, but Pemberton is attuned to what really fills our anxious lives in between odysseys. Blood and quiet, sex and rain." -JW McCormack, literary editor at The Baffler
"This is a book for wanderers and searchers, a love story with all of the attendant cliches wadded into a ball and tossed overboard. LJ Pemberton has written a quarter-life raft for the dissatisfied and unmoored. Still Alive is punch-drunk and furious, listless and wondrous, brilliantly funny and sexy as hell. I devoured it." -Hilary Leichter, author of Temporary and Terrace Story
"Wryly smart, intensely, erotically hot, and with observations that routinely hit with the force of a revelation, Still Alive introduces the world to a literary voice that is utterly engrossing and from whom I can't wait to read more...this is a novel that deftly explores the lassitude and the joy of Figuring Things Out...where your simmering potential is never unlived but ultimately enlivens you. I love it very much and can't recommend it enough." -Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten
"Here is the highest compliment I can pay a fellow artist-when I reached the last page, the last line, the final word of LJ Pemberton's Still Alive, it was enough. A love story rendered in a pointillism so wholly convincing it might as well be photo-realism with just that remove...This is what it's like when, sometime between getting out of bed and returning to it, you encounter a work of art. This is what it's like when someone else's truth reads like your own. This is what it's like to feel less alone." -Guillermo Stitch, author of Lake of Urine
