Women by Chloe Caldwell is a coming into owns queerness story set deeply in the 2010s and was an enjoy novella to listen to.

Once passed around from queer to queer, this novella finally more widely available, and as an audiobook, too, which is how I consumed it.

Women tells the story of a young woman who moves from the country to the city and falls in love with a woman for the first time. Their relationship is doomed from the start. Finn is nineteen years older than the narrator, and has a longtime girlfriend she’s not interested in leaving. This novella shares the obsession, the stolen moments, and the captivation of first love (lust) that’s a bad idea but so many people dive head first into anyway.

I can’t relate to this story, but I did enjoy it and the new forward by Katie Heaney who talks about her own experiences with the book when it was still underground.

The prose is magnetic. I couldn’t stop listening and finished it in about a day, listening while driving and running errands, not taking the headphones out of my ears in between stops. It’s a moment in time, a moment in youth, and it’s nostalgic even if you didn’t live a similar story.