Spare is a memoir that weaves personal history, research, found documents, and present-day narrative. Some recurring sections are epistolary, some concern a single character, others are found correspondence. The book incorporates the lexicon of online forums, the history of eugenics in Maine, facts about the region's drug epidemic, and internal dialogue. Sections braid and layer, providing texture and context to complex themes that include personal and social accountability, privilege, prejudice, socio-economic class, family legacy, and the unreliability of truth.

Michelle Lewis is the recipient of the 2018 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize chosen by Bob Hicok and is the author of Animul/Flame (Conduit Books & Ephemera), which was a finalist for the 2020 Maine Literary Award and winner of the 2020 Midwest Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in Bennington Review, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, and Denver Quarterly among others. She has written for Gettysburg Review, Rain Taxi, Electric Lit, and Anomaly. She is the recipient of two Maine Arts Commission grants, a Vermont Studio Center fellowship and residency, a Monson Arts fellowship and residency, and she has been awarded residencies at The Studios of Key West and Studio Faire in Nérac, France. She lives in Maine.

"I read Michelle Lewis's Spare with a kind of awe and fascination for its arrival at the pared- down and essential, its achievement of the hardest-thing-of-all in prose: the ability, and willingness, to cut through the dross and gift the reader the things we look for in great poetry. Breath. Space. Uncommon voice. Distillation. The play of meaning within a single term. How much can you 'do without'? When 'the bottom falls out,' what are you left with? How do you live? Spare traces a family's, town's, and region's generations-long poverty and the violence of systems bent on naturalizing hardship. If no one is spared, Michelle Lewis arrives, at least, to write the truths back into history, to listen and to tell, in a prose that promises in its careful tracings to do no further harm." — Mary Cappello

"Lewis's memoir is an elegant and elegiac seminar on class in America, and, in her words, what it's like to be poor in the poorest town in Maine--which is to say, far away from the forces that decide one's fate and to live in a state that is not just the state of Maine but one of ambiguity. Her prose is sublime in detail and her story, urgent. I am in awe." — Kerri Arsenault

"Reading this marvelous grief song is like being a stone skipped across the surface of a twilight lake— but with your eyes wide open the whole way across. Smart, curious, empathic, expertly built, and openhearted but never obvious, Spare is a kaleidoscope of a book that has no real forerunners that I can think of. And I'm not going to lie. This book is going to hurt you. But you'll be glad it did. Anyone who cares about mothers, children, the accidents of fate, growing up hard in rural America, and lyric storytelling of the first order must put down their iPhone right now and read it." — Adrian Blevins