Megan Milks w/ Andrea Lawlor & Sandra Newman

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A queer coming-of-age novel about a girlhood interrupted by an eating disorder, only to twist into a genre-bending excavation of gender, identity, and literary mystery.

Meet Margaret. At age twelve, she was head detective of the mystery club Girls Can Solve Anything. Margaret and her three best friends led exciting lives solving crimes, having adventures, and laughing a lot. But now that she's entered high school, the club has disbanded, and Margaret is unmoored—she doesn't want to grow up, and she wishes her friends wouldn't either. Instead, she opts out, developing an eating disorder that quickly takes over her life. When she lands in a treatment center, Margaret finds her path to recovery twisting sideways as she pursues a string of new mysteries involving a ghost, a hidden passage, disturbing desires, and her own vexed relationship with herself.

Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body reimagines nineties adolescence—mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia—in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other. An interrogation of girlhood and nostalgia, dysmorphia and dysphoria, this debut novel puzzles through the weird, ever-evasive questions of growing up.

Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body (Feminist Press, 2021) and Tori Amos Bootleg Webring (the second in Instar Books' new Remember the Internet series, forthcoming 2021). A revised, second edition of their first short fiction collection is forthcoming from Feminist Press in November.

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award for Fiction, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards. Paul, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, is out now from Vintage/Knopf.

Sandra Newman’s new novel The Men comes out from Grove Atlantic in 2022. Her previous novels are The Heavens (which was a New York Times Notable Book), The Country of Ice Cream Star, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, and Cake. She's also the author of four works of nonfiction, including How Not to Write a Novel (with Howard Mittelmark).