Sophomore Riley Turner is all for starting a writing club at her high school with her friends, Vera, Sebastian, and Allison, by her side. It may be challenging to forget about her former crush on one of said friends. Even so, Riley wants to move forward and put the past behind her. But her focus begins to shift when Allison's sister Emily joins.
Emily is quiet and shy; her father, a strict pastor, doesn't exactly allow for her full self-expression. Riley agrees to befriend Emily so that Allison can rest easy once she leaves for college. But things get complicated when she finds herself falling for her. Will she be able to resolve her own struggles while drawing Emily out of her shell? And how long can she keep her growing feelings hidden?
Told from alternating points of view, Can I Have That in Writing? explores teenage struggles with identity, self-acceptance, and emotions that one might not be able to express through words alone.
[CWs: swearing (mild), anxiety/panic, homophobia, punching. Brief mentions of verbal abuse, alcoholism, bleeding, and death of a family member]
In the day-to-day trenches of high school, it is almost the default-setting to believe we are the main character of our own coming-of-age story.
This is not wrong. It's just ours isn't the only story there is.
The jocks, the nerds, the cheerleaders, the losers, the stoners, the fangirls, the skaters. Everyone's the realest most important person in existence, all of them, at the same time, first-person narrators to their own stories, stumbling into each other's plot lines, defying the status-quo, catalysts to ups and downs.
A deconstruction of all the high school tropes and cliches written over the years, a deep-dive into the psyche of students trying to finish high school while going through irrevocable self-discovery, the most improbable of connections, and the insufferable pains of growing up.