Meg Howrey

"They're Going to Love You is my idea of a perfect book. It is about art, life, death, love, and family and it is beautifully and sharply written. I cried several times while reading it, and was sorry to let it go when I was done. I cannot recommend it enough." --Jami Attenberg A magnetic tale of betrayal, art, and ambition, set in the world of professional ballet, New York City during the AIDS crisis, and present-day Los Angeles Carlisle Martin dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer just like her mother, Isabel, a former Balanchine ballerina. Since they live in Ohio, she only gets to see her father Robert for a few precious weeks a year when she visits Greenwich Village, where he lives in an enchanting apartment on Bank Street with his partner, James. Brilliant but troubled, James gives Carlisle an education in all that he holds dear in life--literature, music, and most of all, dance. Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship and the sophistication of their lives, Carlisle's aspiration to become a dancer herself blooms, born of her desire to be asked to stay at Bank Street, to be included in Robert and James' world even as AIDS brings devastation to their community. Instead, a passionate love affair creates a rift between them, with devastating consequences that reverberate for decades to come. Nineteen years later, Carlisle receives a phone call which unravels the fateful events of her life, causing her to see with new eyes how her younger self has informed the woman she's become. They're Going to Love You is a gripping and gorgeously written novel of heartbreaking intensity. With psychological precision and a masterfully revealed secret at its heart, it asks what it takes to be an artist in America, and the price of forgiveness, of ambition, and of love.

A Novel

They're Going to Love You

LMAO, this is the epigraph, opening quote by another author (Henry James) and I'm already like "wowwwwww."

Andre Bohrer

And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.

Kat Albanese

I’ve discovered the pleasures of solitude and acquired the habit of loneliness. These are hard to give up.

“There are certain poems you must read now, Carlisle, when they will make you feel seen. Later on they will make you feel invisible.”

How do you get to have the humility to submit yourself to dance and also the ego to transcend it?

The work of my life has been to ask undanceable questions, and find a way to make ballets out of them.

All pain is equal at the moment of suffering, but after that, suffering gets assigned seating.

Regan Martin

beautiful, poetically written. i loved the book

t. edwards

Isabella 

An elegant, soft and emotional immersion into the world of ballet, the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City, art, family, ambition, estrangement, love. 

An indulgence into professional artists’ and dancers’ methods and passions and paths that I really enjoyed being privy to. The gay fathers you didn’t know you kind of wished you had. Aristocracy and candor.

An elegant, soft and emotional immersion into the world of ballet, the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City, art, family, ambition, estrangement, love. 

An indulgence into professional artists’ and dancers’ methods and passions and paths that I really enjoyed being privy to. The gay fathers you didn’t know you kind of wished you had. Aristocracy and candor.

I loved it. 😌 I will revisit it.

meg howrey has the kind of prose that usually pulls me in: not overbearing, but certainly a memorable voice. beautiful, but not obsessed with beauty to the point of distraction and lack of heart or meat. lovely is kind of really the only adjective for it, in the way that tulle suits the word lovely more than a heavier, more solid fabric. or like tea compared to coffee. idk. prose that can indulge as much reflection and sentiment as possible without inflating under their weight. prose that can love its characters deeply and with layers and despite faults. 

there’s a lot here i valued about the demands of the ballet world, the things we invent and covet in the face of belonging or lack thereof, the difficulties and complexities that come with understanding that our parents are human beings who have done their fair share of inventing and coveting, the perpetual longing of coming just short of greatness, how anger and resentment can struggle to fully form bc of the love and the empathy that comes naturally with understanding. there’s just… plenty of humanity, both the population and the nature and condition of 

human, that has been infused into the weaving of the narrative and the characters. i appreciate that. i appreciate how much warmth was in this book, especially when so many novels i’ve given a shot recently have left me cold or uncaring. i appreciate how much desire to be alive was unapologetically in every beat of the story’s heart. it’s really nice when you can see why a story wanted to be told, and why this way.  

i guess another way of looking at it is that i loved it enough to feel bad that i can’t love it all the way...? the middle portion strained against the back-and-forth format and tested the limits of how much, really, you care about these people beyond the language they offer on the page. the reveal of the betrayal, when it finally came, was just—okay. sure. whatever. the consequent resolution, or what it offered in place of it, fell even flatter. some parts were lingered on for too long; others were rushed past. the images it drew in between were all lovely, and more than anything i feel the most love for this story when i think of it as a love letter from someone who was never loved back by the people she was writing to, but by the end it was like a game of red light-green light and everyone was getting picked off until only carlisle and isabel were left, theirs the most compelling dynamic to me in the entire book bc there are far less easy answers here than there were with robert and james. the latter was presented as the centre of the conflicting pillars the story rests on, but i found that i cared more about the backdrop they were written against than the individuals themselves. i don’t know if i forgave robert, either, after and despite everything. i think i understood the grief sketched around him and james more than i had it in me to love who they were as people. 

it’s a shame that the book spent the least time with isabel and freya when carlisle’s relationships with them as well as her dancers were also the strongest the story had to offer: the unbreakable friendship between women, and the romance and vulnerability of that; the unbreakable love you learn to feel even for a work you hate once you see it out there, alive and not just solely yours anymore; the unbreakable tie between a mother and a daughter, especially when you know full well your mother might have had a far different life ahead of her if she hadn’t had you, and that she raised you the way she wanted to be raised but that only made you feel unloved. robert had no such nuance to him, even in all his relatability and complexity, but maybe it was intentional to depict him and james with this veneer of idyll and simplicity to mirror how carlisle saw them for most of her young life. i also don’t know how serious and/or self-aware this was about how it positioned robert and isabel’s marriage, but i like to think it presents occasional winks of evidence here and there with a knowing eye. 

there’s love in me for this book overall, just maybe not for the pieces it wanted me to be in love with. that’s both alienating and assuring as a reader, which is also strangely how it felt to read about carlisle’s life. i wanted to embrace what she found inviting and be there with her, but it was also as if i grew more and more aware that i was outside of the outside 

was already in. idk. it’s odd when a book has both style and substance yet still doesn’t quite stick the landing you thought it would. i never know where to settle.

meg howrey has the kind of prose that usually pulls me in: not overbearing, but certainly a memorable voice. beautiful, but not obsessed with beauty to the point of distraction and lack of heart or meat. lovely is kind of really the only adjective for it, in the way that tulle suits the word lovely more than a heavier, more solid fabric. or like tea compared to coffee. idk. prose that can indulge as much reflection and sentiment as possible without inflating under their weight. prose that can love its characters deeply and with layers and despite faults. 

there’s a lot here i valued about the demands of the ballet world, the things we invent and covet in the face of belonging or lack thereof, the difficulties and complexities that come with understanding that our parents are human beings who have done their fair share of inventing and coveting, the perpetual longing of coming just short of greatness, how anger and resentment can struggle to fully form bc of the love and the empathy that comes naturally with understanding. there’s just… plenty of humanity, both the population and the nature and condition of being human, that has been infused into the weaving of the narrative and the characters. i appreciate that. i appreciate how much warmth was in this book, especially when so many novels i’ve given a shot recently have left me cold or uncaring. i appreciate how much desire to be alive was unapologetically in every beat of the story’s heart. it’s really nice when you can see why a story wanted to be told, and why this way.  

i guess another way of looking at it is that i loved it enough to feel bad that i can’t love it all the way...? the middle portion strained against the back-and-forth format and tested the limits of how much, really, you care about these people beyond the language they offer on the page. the reveal of the betrayal, when it finally came, was just—okay. sure. whatever. the consequent resolution, or what it offered in place of it, fell even flatter. some parts were lingered on for too long; others were rushed past. the images it drew in between were all lovely, and more than anything i feel the most love for this story when i think of it as a love letter from someone who was never loved back by the people she was writing to, but by the end it was like a game of red light-green light and everyone was getting picked off until only carlisle and isabel were left, theirs the most compelling dynamic to me in the entire book bc there are far less easy answers here than there were with robert and james. the latter was presented as the centre of the conflicting pillars the story rests on, but i found that i cared more about the backdrop they were written against than the individuals themselves. i don’t know if i forgave robert, either, after and despite everything. i think i understood the grief sketched around him and james more than i had it in me to love who they were as people. 

it’s a shame that the book spent the least time with isabel and freya when carlisle’s relationships with them as well as her dancers were also the strongest the story had to offer: the unbreakable friendship between women, and the romance and vulnerability of that; the unbreakable love you learn to feel even for a work you hate once you see it out there, alive and not just solely yours anymore; the unbreakable tie between a mother and a daughter, especially when you know full well your mother might have had a far different life ahead of her if she hadn’t had you, and that she raised you the way she wanted to be raised but that only made you feel unloved. robert had no such nuance to him, even in all his relatability and complexity, but maybe it was intentional to depict him and james with this veneer of idyll and simplicity to mirror how carlisle saw them for most of her young life. i also don’t know how serious and/or self-aware this was about how it positioned robert and isabel’s marriage, but i like to think it presents occasional winks of evidence here and there with a knowing eye. 

there’s love in me for this book overall, just maybe not for the pieces it wanted me to be in love with. that’s both alienating and assuring as a reader, which is also strangely how it felt to read about carlisle’s life. i wanted to embrace what she found inviting and be there with her, but it was also as if i grew more and more aware that i was outside of the outside she was already in. idk. it’s odd when a book has both style and substance yet still doesn’t quite stick the landing you thought it would. i never know where to settle.

They're Going to Love You A Novel

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