I have some pretty big Sheer-Spite-adjacent news: I (Lee, who runs Sheer Spite) have a book coming out, and I’m not publishing it myself???
The book is called The Politics of Lonely: Why Is Friendship So Hard? and it is now up for preorder, publishing September 10, 2026.
You can preorder it here via Sheer Spite
You can preorder it from Fernwood, its publisher
You can preorder it from your favourite independent bookstore
You can put it on your library wishlist,
and ask that your library order copies once it comes out
You can add it to your lists on Storygraph or Goodreads
You COULD preorder it from an evil corporation but I SURE HOPE YOU DON’T >:(
Anyways, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about where this book came from, and about my decision to work with a publisher who is not me!
To a large extent, the book is a massively overgrown sequel to PALS: The Radical Possibilities of Friendship, a zine I first published in 2013, in a moment of my life when I felt overwhelming gratitude for and optimism about the world of queer friendship, and the ways friendship can breach the containment of the more rigid norms that surround romantic and familial relationships.
In the years that followed, PALS has continued to follow me around, even as my feelings about and experiences with friendship became more complicated. I’ve wanted to take it out of print, I’ve wanted to revise it, I’ve wanted to fold it into a longer and more complicated work, and eventually that project grew so far out of hand that it became a book. And now it’s getting published! (PALS still perseveres, although I’ve revised it a little bit and will put out the updated edition once I run out of copies of the current one.)
Basically, the book comes from two frustrations:
- Even people like me who explicitly place friendship as one of their top values and priorities struggle to have and keep the kinds of close, committed friendships we desire
- The commentary I have seen about loneliness and struggles with friendship is largely SO APOLITICAL and completely sidesteps what I feel are the most obvious barriers to connection, which is that everything good has been rotted out by austerity, colonial capitalism, and the deliberate destruction of social safety nets!
So I wrote a book about it! It is grounded in my own experiences, but also folds in research and a lot of conversations with friends. It aims to shed light on the larger structures that influence how our relationships play out. It is not a self-help book, because the whole point is that we are struggling in our friendships less because of our individual failures and more because it is very very very hard out there. However, I am a fundamentally hopeful person, and I think the book reflects that: you will also hear about lots of ways that people are building friendlier, more connected lives.
deciding on self-publishing vs. traditional publishing
Deciding whether to put the book out myself through Sheer Spite, or to try and get someone else to publish it was an extremely tough decision. I struggled mightily with it and I am especially grateful for the kind and candid advice I got from traditionally-published author friends like River Halen, Jeff Miller, and Andi Vicente.
It is a hard choice for many authors to self-publish or to query presses. It is especially weird when you are in the uncommon position of being an author who also runs a one-person small press. I know how to design and lay out a book, I have an online store, I have relationships with many wonderful booksellers, and I genuinely love each of these parts of the process. I could very readily have put the book out myself. The reasons I ultimately decided to seek out a publisher other than myself for this book:
- Curiosity. I just like trying new things!
- Desire to learn more about how a larger small press does things. I am learning a ton about editing, design, marketing, and distribution from working with Fernwood. A lot of my decision to try and work with a publisher other than myself for The Politics of Lonely came from my desire to learn how to be a better editor and publisher by
- Being in a position to be picky about who puts my book out. If none of the presses whose work I admire had been interested in putting out the book, I would have happily put it out myself. Getting traditionally published was not this book’s only chance to get out into the world. I was happy that the book was accepted by Fernwood, since they put out a lot of work I really admire, and their values align with my own: for example, like Sheer Spite, they are also a PACBI signatory, something that is very important to me.
- extremely grudgingly institutional legitimacy. It sucks insanely bad, but a lot of opportunities are gated and only made available to traditionally published authors. This is, in fact, one of the major reasons I started Sheer Spite: to launder that legitimacy for writers and artists I admire. I am aware that there are opportunities for things like grants and writing residencies that only become available to someone once another person publishes their work. I deeply hate this but it is the case.
I am happy with this decision! I really like and respect everyone I have worked with at Fernwood: in particular, the book’s editor, Fazeela Jiwa, really challenged me on ways I centre whiteness and people similar to me in my writing, and how to be more thoughtful and critical about who I write for and to, and what I mean when I say things like “we”. And I am both excited and nervous for the book to go elsewhere and potentially farther than other things I have written.
