Never Have I Ever

July 22, 2013
A Judy Blume–meets–Carrie Bradshaw memoir about how, despite boys and growing up, friendship between women endures. Never mind that 25-year-old Katie Heaney and her friends’ sole topic of conversation is men: “I hope this book feels you and I are hanging out, and I am drinking too much and talking to you… for a really long time,” she writes. In this, she succeeds. The problem with writing about absence—in this case, the absence of a love life—is self-evident: waiting, longing, and miscommunication do not make for a coherent story. Heaney’s therefore bland first book seems more like a blog than a memoir, beginning (as, being so young, perhaps she must) with her manifestly normal elementary school years and progressing through grad school (we’re never told what she is studying). “There must be differences between the way a fourteen-year-old acts toward a boy she likes versus the way a twenty-five-year-old does, but I am still struggling to understand what they are supposed to be,” Heaney admits. One can’t help but wish she’d waited a decade or two before attempting memoir, or else cut a few R-rated sections and marketed it as YA. Agent: Allison Hunter, Inkwell.

December 1, 2013
One woman's confessions about not having a love life. Beginning with her first boy infatuation at age 7 and advancing to the ripe age of 25, Heaney takes readers on an exhaustive, descriptive jaunt through her multiple boy crushes and attempts to obtain a boyfriend. Readers who get through the first 20 pages without thinking "who cares" may enjoy the author's self-deprecating humor, which borders on unfunny as she laments and bemoans her fate. She claims, however, that "[m]ost of the time it does not upset me to think about my sad, old, decrepit spinster body...not having a boyfriend at any given moment bothers me very little. Not having ever had one bothers me only slightly more." Tongue in cheek, Heaney reminisces about boys from kindergarten and beyond--their hair, the way they talked, how she felt around them, what she wrote in her diary back then; she quotes to emphasize her points. This sets the tone as she proceeds to delve deeply into her affections, near loves and possible first dates in high school, college and graduate school. She tried drinking, being flirty, being distant and aloof, and even succumbed to the oftentimes humiliating moments of setting up an online dating profile only to discover that some men send the exact same message to every single woman. Throughout multiple near hits, an occasional kiss or two, and numerous boy friends but no boyfriends, the author has maintained her circle of girlfriends to gossip with, run to for advice and downright hate when any of them lands the guy they both secretly desired. Heaney's misadventures are more a testament to the power of friendship among women than anything comical regarding her struggle to find real love. A drawn-out, sometimes-amusing examination of the author's search for a loving relationship with a man, any man.

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November 1, 2013
The title of Heaney's wry memoir could have readers believing she's lived the life of a nun. Hardly. At 25, she has, in fact, had plenty of engaging encounters with the opposite sex, just no serious, long-term relationships. When it comes to courtship, Heaney laments that she is not a lighthouse, a luminous being who easily attracts others. Her lovely and slightly wild gal pal, Rylee, on the other hand, possesses maximum wattage, racking up scores of romantic attachments (Heaney calls her the Babe Ruth of daters ). Heaney is a tall, attractive brunette, and there is nothing wrong with her libido; case in point, her caffeinated crush on a Starbucks barista. Heaney even survives a slightly frightening foray into online dating, describing her time logging on for love at matchup site OKCupid as tantamount to a free zoo. There are some cute animals there that you can look at without paying a dime, she writes, but spending too much time there is just going to make you sad. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)