Melanie Conroy-Goldman

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.


All Books

The Likely World

Melanie Conroy-Goldman

Publication Date: August 4, 2020

$18.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-808-3

Description:

Single mom Mellie has just emerged from a shattering addiction to the memory drug, cloud, when a stranger who may be her baby’s father appears with a dangerous agenda.

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.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“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, author of The Fortunes, a Chautauqua Prize winner

“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, author of Veronica, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award

“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 second 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

News

Vanity Fair: Admiration Society

Lysley Tenorio, author of the trenchant family comedy The Son of Good Fortune, recommends The Likely World by Melanie Conroy Goldman. Check out the full feature in the July/August 2020 […]

Reviews