Still Life
Everything in Edith's life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead.
Still Life volleys between the present and recent past, chronicling the lives of three women--one cis, two trans, all forever entwined. Edith was a bumbling "boy" pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to the musical backdrop of their fledgling adulthood. When Edith decides to leave behind the East Coast for graduate school, she begins a yearslong journey away from the person she loves most and toward a hazy new understanding of who she will become.
In the present, Edith visits Boston feeling like a failure of a writer, a failure of a girl, and wracked with guilt over Val's death. Val, the intrepid wanderer, had drifted in and out of Edith's life, arriving in Texas with estrogen pills and wisdom from a life on the road. A sometimes lover, sometimes trans mentor, Val was everything Tessa wasn't and everything Edith needed. Home alone in Texas, she is left loveless and exhausted as the state slowly chips away at trans rights. Was Val's fatal car crash Edith's fault? Would she have stayed put if Edith had loved her better?
Katherine Packert Burke's debut novel unfolds like a rusty pocketknife, jagged and lacerating. Infused with pop culture, cigarettes, and Sondheim, Still Life traces the lives of three friends, authentic and evolving, loving and cruel, here and gone, to craft a tableau of modern womanhood.
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Still Life is vibrantly, brilliantly alive--by turns steely and delicate, wintry and warm, tart and bittersweet, elegiac and joyous. Just like the music and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim (this novel's patron saint, quietly ever-present), Katherine Packert Burke's writing is cerebral and exquisitely precise yet brimming with feeling.--James Frankie Thomas, author of Idlewild
Katherine Packert Burke's Still Life is everything you want from a Künstlerroman: smart, sexy, funny, sly, and exceptionally queer. With biting insights and heartbreaking attention, this debut captures the daunting thrill of becoming an artist while becoming yourself.--Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
Katherine Packert Burke has written such a warm book on red-state trans loneliness and the very real loves, cis and trans, that circle it. I love the jokes and nicknames; the riffs on Paul Cézanne, Stephen Sondheim, and Gossip Girl; and the care with which its three core characters face their losses and departures. I loved them--and more importantly, Burke does too. You'll feel it.--Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun
Do you filter absolutely everything through art? Are you worried that one specific person in your past has messed you up permanently? Can you often be found thinking WILL I ALWAYS BE THIS WAY If so, you might be me, and this book is for the both of us. Katherine Packert Burke is both wise and clever, ironic and not, and with Still Life makes the autofiction snake devour its own tail and go back for seconds.--Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection and Private Citizens
Katherine Packert Burke's masterpiece of a novel brilliantly illuminates the ways we're shaped by the people and places that surround us.... I've never read anything that so perfectly captures the beautiful, chaotic, messy tangle of queer friends figuring out who they are together.--Emet North, author of In Universes
