The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

Overview

Twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user’s short-term memory, have left single mom Mellie with her mind in fragments. With the help of a tough-minded sponsor, and motivated by her own medically-challenged daughter, Mellie clings to a fragile sobriety. Then, on the evening of her twenty-ninth day sober, a stranger pulls into her driveway and her heart surges. However, when Mellie’s pursuit of this man and the past they may share threatens her sponsor, Mellie will have to put her tiny family and her recovery at risk in hopes of saving the woman who saved her first.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597098083
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Melanie Conroy-Goldman is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges where she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers, which has hosted such notables as Mary Gaitskill, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Jeff VanderMeer. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Southern Review and StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s, and online at venues such as McSweeney’s. She also volunteers at a maximum security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. Her work is represented by Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, daughter, and step-daughters.

Read an Excerpt

From The Likely World

Excerpt 1:

Look. I spent ten years, twenty, vowing to get sober. I’d wake up, today’s the day. Sometimes I’d make it to noon. Sometimes I’d make it to breakfast. Each evening turned into a story about staying high enough not to hate myself for my own weakness. And then in the hospital, they showed me Juni’s little beating heart on the monitor and I turned over a new leaf. Except no, I didn’t. Even a baby in my belly, even a baby three months old and crying did not get me clean. And then, two years later, in the senseless logic of addiction and recovery, my toddler got me sober where my baby did not. Twenty-nine days. It may not sound like much but it’s the biggest, baddest thing I’ve ever done, and every second of it hurts like hell.

Did I eat cloud when she was inside me? Yes. Was she born damaged because of it? Yes. Yes. She has a regular brain and all the usual limbs, but there are characteristic oddities in the size and shape of her fingernails, in the splay of her toes. There is a typical tendency towards respiratory infection that may turn to nothing, or may kill her. Developmentally, there’s real variation from child to child. Cloud use, in utero, is under-studied. For now, I can say that she’s fine.


Excerpt 2:

If they made a war on it, and funded longitudinal research about it, and started granting PhDs in it; if they put it in a large hadron collider; if they beamed lasers at it and pummeled it with particles and derived formulae about it, they would never prove what we know about cloud. What we who have indentured ourselves to cloud’s insight and greed know for sure. We know it in our bones and in our mouths. We whisper it to each other at the pizza shops and in the rehab centers and waiting to get our stomachs pumped in the emergency room.

There are other lives we lead, right alongside this one. Perhaps cloud makes those realities; perhaps they pre-exist the cloud use, and cloud merely shifts us from one plane to another. Regardless, the evidence is there.

Editorial Reviews

06/22/2020

Conroy-Goldman’s propulsive debut explores a drug-addicted woman’s struggle for sobriety and a new life. Mellie, 38 and mother of two-year-old Juni, is 29 days sober when a mysterious, menacing man drives a black SUV into her driveway in Roslindale, Mass. The author then recounts Mellie’s 25-year addiction to a drug called cloud, which erases short-term memory, as themes of motherhood, love, and addiction collide in heartbreaking and dangerous ways. As a teenager, Mellie is a smart wallflower who lives with her new-age single mother and attends a posh private school where she hangs around her crush, Paul, and Judah. After being rejected by Paul at a party, Judah gives Mellie her first dose of cloud. Fast-forward a few years and Mellie is a full-blown addict living with Paul and performing in the porn industry. Now, Mellie consults her written accounts of what’s happened to her, piecing together the connection between the arrival of the SUV and the life in porn she’s only recently gotten away from, while juggling her obligations to Juni amid her urge to start using again. The story feels overlong, but the prose is exquisite (“The familiar and the strange have swapped; things have gone missing entirely”). This skillful twist on the addiction narrative is worth a look. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Conroy-Goldman’s gritty street postmodernism will rewire your brain in ways that recall David Foster Wallace or Philip K. Dick. But it’s the depth of feeling here, about love, about motherhood, reminiscent of Rachel Kushner or Claire Vaye Watkins, that will break your heart." –Peter Ho Davies

"The Likely World is bizarre and beautiful, equal parts brainy lit and gut-bucket pulp. Its heroine is unlike any female character I’ve ever encountered and I love her." —Mary Gaitskill

"Inside the strata of motherhood and memory a pulse throbs, a rhythm around a body that won't quit asking: Who are you? Where are you? Why? The woman at the center of The Likely World vibrates between addiction, memory, nostalgia, and being in a future landscape about ten seconds from our present tense. To be sober in The Likely World is to risk having heart again; to be fully alive is to risk having your heart broken open. I love this mother. I love this daughter. I love this revision of what we mean when we say family—fragmenting its way into the future one glorious mind flip at a time. I fucking love this book." —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge

“I don’t know if you’ll ever read a literary novel like The Likely World this or any other year. It’s groovy, badass smart, and totally trippy, but also full of heartache and longing and the woundings of love. This novel absolutely sparkles with brightness and life." —Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction

"This book takes risks, and for that I am thankful. The complex depictions of motherhood and childhood colliding with a disturbingly tempting memory-wiping drug make this novel special and unforgettable." —Lindsay Lerman of Lit Reactor

A "propulsive debut . . . [where] themes of motherhood, love, and addiction collide in heartbreaking and dangerous ways. . . [T]he prose is exquisite . . . This skillful twist on the addiction narrative is worth a look." —Publishers Weekly

"Conroy-Goldman’s postmodern novel beautifully speaks to the complexity of real life and addiction. Similar to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, it’s a novel about addiction with an affinity for the strangeness of modern life, an investigation into modern brains, which are treated as computers with intricate and complex webs of synapses." —Alexis David, North of Oxford

From the Publisher