07/02/2026
This just in: galleys have arrived for ALEX! Pre-order Fiona Warnick’s upcoming novel now.
Six months after graduation, Willa receives a text from Alex, her situationship from senior year. What would it mean to reply? What would it mean to not reply? In search of an understanding of what makes a woman act, again and again, against her better judgement, she begins a post-mortem of their non-relationship. Her working hypothesis: she did it for the plot.
“For centuries, women in novels had been making fools of themselves for the sake of good s*x,” Willa asserts. But for her, it was the other way around. Less interested in s*x, and more interested in feeling like she was a woman in a novel, Willa chased Alex in order to make a fool of herself. The s*x itself was secondary: an endnote, separate from and simultaneous to the plot of her life.
What begins as a comic novel of one woman’s inability to let go of a crush develops into a forthright ode to youth, q***r desire, and friendship. In clean, playful sentences, Alex tells a story about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the ridiculous ways we’ve acted in the past.
