I Can Finally Tell You About My Next Book

If You Love That Lady forthcoming from W.W. Norton · July 2026

Dear Friends,

I’ve been quietly working on this book for four years, and I am thrilled to finally be able to share it with you.

If You Love That Lady is my third book, and it’s an ode to every writer’s invention of love and the beloved. It’s also about the sometimes-wrong invention of this country, and how we quietly safeguard ourselves against it and stay human.

If You Love That Lady forthcoming from W.W. Norton · July 2026

You can preorder If You Love That Lady here.

In 2021, I came across a letter written by John Miller, a pastor, to Sally McDowell, ex-wife of the former governor of Baltimore. The letter—charming, intimate, wry—contained an itemized list of things he was certain of: #1—that he loved her.

Their courtship was full of idiosyncratic allusions and the kind of genuine vulnerability we seek but seem, in an age of performance and multiplying distances, unable to sustain with each other.

McDowell and Miller exchanged hundreds of letters in the five years leading up to the American Civil War. The pace of these exchanges reminded me that desire needs silence, room for the mind to risk itself in imagination. It is *the* act of the imagination that our lives are built upon.

Reading their correspondence, I witnessed the slow forming of a transformative and lifelong bond in an America on the brink of implosion. I too am—we all are—writing in an America on the precipice of self-actualization or demise.

So, I wrote this book trying to get to the bottom of my own understanding of how time, place, and distance shape the stories we tell ourselves about desire. If you’ve ever found yourself inventing a person on the page or discovering yourself through the page, this book is for you.

Much more on all of this soon, but I wanted to share this with you, the strangers-turned-friends I think of each week as I write, as soon as I could.

Love,
xM