MIRIAM

“I spent the happiest days of my twenties failing to mop the floor right in a conservative anabaptist community in Kent, England. I was besotted with a boy with whom I could not speak licitly, and in giddy awe of the woman assigned to play my mother: a relentlessly weird genius with five children and a few semesters of community college culinary training. I couldn't see or even Google either of them when I left - the community resumed holy invisibility, returned my mail unopened. I bored everyone who'd listen with missing it; I felt functionally pointless; back in the Manhattan apartment where I'd grown up, I cosplayed modesty, tied my kerchief under my chin the special way I'd been shown, so that the tails didn't poke me in the throat. And I wrote “Miriam”, as an excuse to remain in a world and mind that I still loved from exile.”

Kate Riley wrote her debut novel, Miriam, eight or nine years ago as a series of micro-dispatches (on an iPod Touch) to her heroically patient, encouraging friend, New York Times book critic Molly Young, who helped her wrestle it into its sublime final shape. Molly has recently published in an edition of a few hundred lovingly designed copies, to be circulated by supportive, awed friends among would-be enthusiasts, one whom catchily volunteered:

“The Biblical Books of Ruth and Esther have found their American sister-wife in Miriam, the serenely weird testament of an unintentional heroine in an intentional community, and an act of novelistic grace that deserves more than cult status, but its own goddamned religion.” —Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus, 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

A selection of the novel appeared in n+1 in 2017, and another excerpt is featured in the current issue of The Paris Review. Kate lives on a farm in Virginia with her husband.