Little Deaths All in a Row: Essays on Sex and Death, is a personal, philosophical, and scientific journey. While at first glance sex and death may seem diametrically opposed, in these essays Earley uses her intimate encounters to illustrate the ways in which they are unexpectedly and inextricably linked. Using her personal experiences as a queer mother, a volunteer hospice caretaker, and a scientist as a multi-faceted lens through which to view these topics, she offers readers new ways to think about what it means to be alive, even in the face of death.
The essays in this book are in continuous and direct conversation with one another: driven by intellect, scientific insights, and emotional power, they forge insightful connections between sex and death that illuminate and interrogate two of the central truths of our human condition: sexual and mortal. In the tradition of Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich's The Fact of a Body, and Melissa Febos's Abandon Me, Little Deaths All in a Row aims to spark a dialogue between the rational sphere of the brain and the intuitive realm of the body; between the erotic choices we make, and the end-of-life choices we are not always able to make, but are witnessed by others. This is the narrative mystery that serves as the engine of the book.
Embodied in the work is the gamut of Earley's erotic experiences of queer love, both the ecstasy and the heartbreak. She dives into the struggles and joys of her life as a mother of two children in a non-traditional, queered family structure.
As a hospice care volunteer, she is continually at the forefront of others' experiences of death and dying, and the very different processes each person goes through. As a scientist, she has studied the brain chemistry of death, and has stared down traumatic memories of her own near-fatal wounds, searching for links between pain and pleasure, temporary moments of release, and permanent endings.
Advanced Praise for Little Deaths All in a Row:
"Shades of Carmen Machado's In the Dream House, and I mean that as a galactic compliment . . . What an intriguing, compelling helix . . . Intellectually exciting and driven by a kind of heart-quest. SO THRILLING to see the 'mono story' of motherhood and marriage and sex blown to bits from the get-go." —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water
"This vulnerable, cerebral, emotional, and powerful work will take you to unexpected, magical, and utterly mysterious places." —Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World
Elizabeth Earley is a clinical scientist with a background in biology and organic chemistry. She is the author of the popular Substack series, Queering Reality, with 100,000+ subscribers. She is also the author of two novels: A Map of Everything, a debut finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize; and Like Wings, Your Hands (Red Hen Press), winner of the Women's Prose Prize (judged by Aimee Bender), the American Fiction Prize for Best LGBTQ novel, and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction by the Publishing Triangle, alongside Ocean Vuong and Jacqueline Woodson. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University-Los Angeles. Her stories and essays have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The First Line Magazine, Fugue, Hair Trigger, and Glimmer Train, among other publications. She was awarded the David Friedman Memorial Prize for Fiction and was twice a finalist for the AWP New Journals Award. She has received two Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for the 2011 Bakeless Literary Prize for Fiction.
