Join us at Buffalo Street Books as we welcome our very own Kate Doyle back to Ithaca and discuss her new collection of stories, I Meant it Once.

This sharp and original debut collection captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, preoccupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In “That Is Shocking,” a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote” and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in a whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world. I Meant It Once is a luminous and witty collective portrait of young women on the cusp of becoming.