Bitter Texas Honey

The Royal Tenenbaums meets Fleabag in this hilarious and dizzyingly smart debut about an over-the-top evangelical Texan family--and the daughter at its center racing to finish her very important novel before her ex-boyfriend finishes his.

It's 2011, and twenty-three-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, God-loving family. Sure, she listens to conservative talk radio on her way to and from her internship at the Capitol. But she was once an America-hating leftist who kissed girls at parties, refused to shave, and had plenty of emotionless sex with jazz school friends--that is until a drug-induced mania forced her to return to her senses.

But above all Joan is a writer, an artist, or at least she desperately wants to be. Always in search of inspiration for her novel, she catalogs every detail of her relationships with men--including with her former muse slash current arch nemesis Roberto--and mines her very dysfunctional family for material. But when her beloved, credit card debt-racked cousin Wyatt finds himself in crisis, Joan's worldview is cracked open and everything comes crashing down.

Funny, whip-smart, and often tender, Bitter Texas Honey introduces us to the unforgettable and indefatigable Joan West: ambitious, full of contradictions, utterly herself. As she wades through it all--addiction, politics, loss, and, notably, her father's string of increasingly bizarre girlfriends--we witness her confront what it means to be a person, and an artist, in the world.

Author: Ashley Whitaker
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 04/15/2025
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.37w x 1.12d
ISBN: 9780593476154