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
