Alex

Alex is a comic, hyper-analytical campus novel about Willa, a young queer woman in her final year at a small liberal-arts college she calls “the fake place,” and her obsessive, mostly unreciprocated attachment to Alex Dean, a nonbinary student with blond curls, a gap between their teeth, a sexually adventurous reputation, and very little interest in giving Willa the kind of narrative clarity she craves.

The novel is framed from after graduation. Six months after leaving school, Willa receives a meme from Alex: an actress smiling in a purple dress with text about having sex that does not advance the plot of one’s life. This is the first message Alex has sent in half a year. Willa does not know whether to reply. Replying would mean reentering a dynamic she thought she had escaped. Not replying would reveal that she is still hurt. This text triggers the novel’s real action: Willa’s postmortem of the final year, in which she tries to understand why she repeatedly acted against her better judgment. Her hypothesis is that she did it “for the plot.”

The book’s formal joke is that the plot and the sex are separated. The main body tells the social, emotional and intellectual story; the sex scenes are displaced into endnotes written as rhymed sonnets. This matches Willa’s theory that sex itself was not the point. For her, sex with Alex was not primarily pleasure. It was a way of making something happen, creating a story in which she could be a woman behaving foolishly, desiring, suffering, interpreting, and therefore existing as a character.