We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  To the teachers at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, who cared daily for my daughter. On that same note, thank you to my in-laws, Don and Lannie Whatley, for babysitting both my kids almost every weekend so I could escape for a few hours to work on this novel.

  Thank you to Jack and Diana Wisdom for being the best parents ever: for listening, loving, supporting, babysitting, encouraging, praying, and for so many things I can’t even begin to list them all here. I love you!

  Finally, thank you to my little family. To Margaux and Townes, I love you. To Josh, I love you. Without you, I’m not sure I would have ever written a thing. Thank you for believing in me, always.

  About the Author

  BORN, RAISED, AND based in Houston, Texas, ALISON WISDOM has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and was a finalist for the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, and other publications.

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  Praise for We Can Only Save Ourselves

  “Captivating.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Beautiful and wry, We Can Only Save Ourselves is the story of a teenager who breaks free from the confines of her suburban home to try to find a more authentic way of living. I wanted to look away as the novel spun toward an ominous conclusion, but I couldn’t stop reading. A haunting and immersive debut with echoes of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides.”

  —Kate Hope Day, author of If, Then and In the Quick

  “This is a melancholy, dreamlike book about group dynamics, power, growing up, and the choices people can’t take back. Alison Wisdom gives her haunting story a quiet but inexorable forward momentum—like that of adolescence itself.”

  —Lydia Kiesling, author of Golden State

  “Alison Wisdom’s clear-eyed debut lulls you into a tenuous comfort, only to jump out when least expected. The collective narration flawlessly juggles youthful idealism and hardened maturity, marking the decisions women make—both deliberate and coerced—and their struggle to break free from societies determined to stifle their freedom to choose. Insidiously haunting, subtly clever, and impossible to put down.”

  —Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild

  “A haunting, beautifully written story of a girl falling into darkness. Alison Wisdom renders a fascinating portrayal of the subtle shifts in tension, power, and affection among the young women who follow a Mansonesque cult leader. With the propulsion of a page-turner and the detail of a psychological study, We Can Only Save Ourselves is a stark and captivating novel.”

  —Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters

  “In this tense, complicated novel, the loss of a daughter is observed through the singular, haunting voice of the town’s mothers as they wage a daily battle for safety under the guise of conformity and belonging. What is the cost of leaving, and what is the cost of staying? There are no easy answers in this thrilling debut novel by Texas writer Alison Wisdom, whose taut, steely prose reveals new complexities, questions, and dangers with each turn of the page.”

  —Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine

  “Alison Wisdom’s addictive, down-the-rabbit-hole debut reads like The Girls by way of The Virgin Suicides, with an extra dash of Cheever’s unsettling suburbia. The result is sinister and surprising: a novel I couldn’t put down, and one that I kept thinking about long after I’d reached its unexpected, chilling end.”

  —Emily Temple, author of The Lightness

  “In her beguiling debut, Alison Wisdom exposes the menace concealed just beneath the surface of the ordinary. When Alice Lange falls off the map, abandoning her status as a beloved it-girl in her suburban enclave to pursue a mysterious stranger, I fell right with her. A story of mothers and daughters, the competing allures of safety and danger, and the volatility of early adulthood, this is a spellbinding novel that followed me into my days.”

  —Alexis Schaitkin, author of Saint X

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WE CAN ONLY SAVE OURSELVES. Copyright © 2021 by Alison Wisdom. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Joanne O’Neill

  Cover photographs © Igor Ustynskyy/Getty Images (woman);

  © Flashworks/E+/Getty Images (texture)

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-299615-2

  Version 12182020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-299614-5 (pbk.)

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-304817-1 (library edition)

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