Penguin Random House: Debut author Lauren McBrayer’s LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE is Belletrist’s July Book Club Pick

Belletrist has announced that their July Book Club pick is Lauren McBrayer’s LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE, published by Putnam! The selection was revealed on the Belletrist Instagram page over the holiday weekend. To watch the announcement, click here.

LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE is McBrayer’s adult debut and explores the sensation of friendship as it transforms into romance. It is also a realistic portrayal of what it feels like to be a like to be a parent, particularly a working mother, and captures that loss of self that comes after children and years of marriage. Lauren says “I am absolutely writing from personal experience. For me it wasn’t so much a loss of self as a fracturing of self. It felt like I was constantly toggling between all these different identities, all these separate modes. Mom mode. Work mode. Wife mode. Nowhere was I integrated into one holistic person. It was all very confusing and I never felt like myself anywhere. This is the essence of what I was trying to capture in the early chapters of LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE.”

LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE has received glowing coverage in The Washington Post, Hollywood Reporter, Good Housekeeping, New York Post, Lithub, and a starred review from Kirkus that raved “… with a zippy pace, punchy dialogue, and beautifully crafted sentences that manage to capture the tenderness of longing and self-discovery, Merit and Jane’s love story feels both realistic and escapist, a queer romance done right.” Since publication in April, McBrayer has been pounding the page with original essays, with meaningful pieces published this summer in Vogue (“In Finishing My Book, I Rewrote the Story of My Own Life”), Salon (“Say gay”), and forthcoming in Good Housekeeping.