“Written with wit and sensitivity and exquisite emotional intelligence, Stray City is an absolute pleasure to read. “I tore through this novel like an orphaned reader seeking a home in the ragtag yet shimmering world that Chelsey Johnson so wondrously brings to life.” - Carrie Brownstein, New York Times bestselling author Honestly, one of the most absorbing, finely tuned books I’ve had the pleasure of falling down into. 'Stray City has it all as funny as it is moving, as joyful, as radically communal, as it is lonesome, the story covers the varied complications of place, home, sex, city-but mostly it’s about the necessary and unexpected revolutions of the self, and about how queerly we make our way through this world. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she’s pregnant-and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.Ī decade later, when her precocious daughter Lucia starts asking questions about the father she’s never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she’s worked so hard to build.Ī thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we’re born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend’s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man.

Twenty-four-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood-and the closet-to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable motherhood, and the complications of belonging-to a city, a culture, and a family-when none of them can quite contain who you really are.Īll of us were refugees of the nuclear family.

Stray city by chelsey johnson