How It Works Out

By: Myriam Lacroix

Narrated by: Lucy Ellis, Anika Venkatesh

Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Surreal, darkly comic and achingly tender, Myriam Lacroix's exuberant debut sees a queer love story play out in many alternate realities.

What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out?

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker - or sexier - would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.

Equal parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a genre-bending, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.

©2024 Myriam Lacroix (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

What an audacious, breathtaking and inspiring debut. The power of this formally innovative and deeply funny book is that everything exists to serve the compassionate heart at its core. Myriam Lacroix's work is a cause for celebration (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo)

Lacroix has written a beautifully brilliant, hilariously sad, stunner of a debut that never forgets about the heart (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars)

Hilarious, heart-rending, grotesque, delightful, utterly brilliant (Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under)

How It Works Out is madcap, delirious, exhilaratingly good (Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love)

How It Works Out is a delightfully bizarre and unabashedly queer revelation; a truly captivating exploration of love. Myriam Lacroix's kaleidoscopic first novel invites you to embrace the unconventional and revel in the multiverse of 'what-ifs' we only wish we could explore in our own relationships. We loved it (Tegan and Sara Quin, authors of High School)