Tell Me One Thing

by Kerri Schlottman

Overview

A 2024 PenCraft Fiction Award Winner

A 2023 American Book Fest Best Literary Fiction Finalist

A Shelf Awareness Best Book This Week

In the gritty backdrop of rural Pennsylvania, nine-year-old Lulu's encounter with a trucker outside a rundown motel is captured on film by aspiring photographer Quinn who is passing through town. While the image launches Quinn's career, Lulu fights to survive in a volatile home. Decades later, Quinn's "Lulu & the Trucker" has fetched a staggering price at auction as she's preparing for a major retrospective of her photographic work. Lulu, now grown and struggling to make ends meet, stumbles upon her own image in the newspaper. Determined and emboldened, she attends Quinn's exhibition talk with a single burning question: Why didn't you help me all those years ago?

At its heart, Tell Me One Thing explores the unbreakable bonds that connect us across the fault lines of time and memory. From the gritty streets of 1980s New York City to the forgotten corners of the rust belt, the novel unveils the disparities and sacrifices woven into the fabric of America and is a poignant reminder of the enduring consequences of choice and the resilience required to navigate a world shaped by privilege and adversity. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798218495923
Publisher:	Paper Knife Press
Publication date:	08/29/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	246
File size:	483 KB

About the Author

Kerri Schlottman is a Detroiter turned New Yorker who works to support artists, performers, and writers in creating new projects. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Dillydoun Review, Belle Ombre, Women Writers Women’s Books, Muse Apprentice Guild, and The Furnace. She placed second in the Dillydoun International Fiction Prize, has been longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, and was a 2021 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize semifinalist.

Editorial Reviews

11/28/2022

Two women’s paths cross and their lives are forever altered in Schlottman’s dynamic, character-driven debut. In 1980, amateur SoHo-based photographer Quinn Bradford travels to Philadelphia with her boyfriend on a drug pickup run. While there, she spies Lulu, a young girl posed atop a trucker’s knee dangling a cigarette, and captures the moment with her Instamatic. The image becomes her “golden ticket” and catapults Quinn’s career and notoriety to unforeseen heights. Four decades later, with Quinn’s popularity swelling demand for her work, the now-iconic Lulu and the Trucker image commands a high price at auction. In a parallel narrative following the moment of the snapshot, Lulu deals with a hardscrabble childhood living in a trailer park with her mother, a sex worker who’s addicted to drugs and resentful of Lulu’s burden. A crisis point arrives in the present day, when Lulu attends a retrospective of Quinn’s work, hoping to question Quinn as to why she never kept in touch. Schlottman acutely nails the misty, gold-hued atmosphere of the 1980s, and deeply explores themes of class and privilege. Though a surprising conclusion fumbles some of the narrative momentum, the ending is poignant nonetheless. This thought-provoking work will put readers on the lookout for what the author does next. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] dynamic, character-driven debut... Schlottman acutely nails the misty, gold-hued atmosphere of the 1980s, and deeply explores themes of class and privilege...This thought-provoking work will put readers on the lookout for what the author does next."  —Publishers Weekly

“Vivid.”  —Booklist

“In Tell Me One Thing, two women's stories begin in an instant—with a shutter click. Divergent yet inextricable, the paths and aspirations of a photographer and her young subject leap and shatter through the passage of four decades and at the mercy of American dearth, all of which Schlottman relays with understated grit and unflinching humanity. As we follow the photographer through seedy 1980s New York to today's commercially sterilized iteration, Schlottman proceeds to vivify a Polaraid snapped in a Pennsylvania trailer park, infusing viscerality and tragedy into a portrait that would have otherwise hung static on a collector's wall. By reframing an object to be admired as a child to be protected, Tell Me One Thing will both compel and confront readers with questions that only the finest of novels can posit.”  —Jakob Guanzon, author of Abundance, longlisted for the National Book Award

“At once the expansive story of two women navigating two disparate, intersecting lives, and a thoughtful meditation on the transtemporal power of photography, Kerri Schlottman's Tell Me One Thing is that rare book: an art world novel with heart.”  —Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy

“Kerri Schlottman has delivered us the richest of reading experiences. I read Tell Me One Thing voraciously with equal parts intrigue and admiration, thinking how did she pull this off? Slinking expertly between time and location and point of view—the contrasts here are bright and nuanced, honest and vulnerable, jagged yet tender. This is a novel of great heart, examining the lines we draw as we become who we are. A devastating and rich exploration of trauma, art-making, love and the unmistakable hauntedness of what we cannot control, yet long to. I want everyone to read this book."  —Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke

“With a clear, empathic gaze, and with a sharp, startling intelligence, Kerri Schlottman's Tell Me One Thing traces two paths—that of artist, and that of subject—through the cruel disparities of the Reagan eighties and beyond. The result is a book that asks enduring questions about what art is for and what we, all of us, owe one another. Tell Me One Thing is phenomenal."  —Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car

“Fans of The Vanishing Half will love this novel written in alternating points-of-view: each one a perspective rooted in a starkly contrasting experience and yet one that echoes the longings of the other. Reading this was a much-needed exercise in empathy, one tempered by clear, endearing prose. In the parallel universes of two unforgettable characters, Schlottman renders on the page a simple and beautiful expression of our shared humanity. In Tell Me One Thing, we see the private struggles of a famed photographer making it in the wild days of New York City and how her seminal work exposes and yet neglects the harsh truth of one of her subjects. My heart broke and rooted for both characters, and long after I’ve turned the last page, I am still thinking of them.”  —Cinelle Barnes, author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“I loved the way Tell Me One Thing follows two women trying to find their ways in the world — Quinn, the starving artist whose work rescues her from grinding poverty, and Lulu, a subject of Quinn’s photography, whose own ways of working only mire her further into destitution and desperation. Kerri Schlottman’s vivid writing skillfully recreates 1980s New York City and rural Pennsylvania; we’re invited to witness both the heady art-world scene of the era and the foundations being set for the opioid epidemic. It’s such a smart and well-crafted novel, bursting with life. I couldn’t put it down.”  —Amy Shearn, award-winning author of Unseen City and other novels

From the Publisher