“You can’t escape anything in a small town. The town knows everything, and not enough. All the guys you slept with, but not which ones you loved. It makes you up from pieces, glimpses of you seen around, at the firemen’s field days, the bar, the drive-thru.”
—from the first chapter of Pashley’s The Scamp, out this August from Tin House Books
“Gritty, seductive, and completely mesmerizing, Jennifer Pashley’s debut novel limns a
Everything was a secret. Everything important still is. One of us craves truth, loud and certain. One of us, silence. The others, only the hum of their own worlds, turning for themselves alone.
Our secrets included everything: my father’s first marriage to a woman so critically ill she spent much of her life in a sanitarium; my mother’s first marriage, which included my oldest brother, whom I did not meet at all
