Launch: I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle
Launch: I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle
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Launch: I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle

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Tuesday 3rd October
1830

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Join us for the launch of I Meant It Once, the debut story collection by Kate Doyle. Kate will be in conversation with Burley Fisher's own Samuel Fisher.

I Meant It Once:

"[A] lively debut collection… Doyle’s prose reads like Lydia Davis at her most arch and pensive."―Washington Post

"What's so impressive about Doyle's writing is not only that she manages to express and engage with nebulous and difficult-to-articulate emotional ideas...but that in doing so she also manages to suffuse these apparently anti-plot stories with riveting readability"―Irish Times


With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships – with friends, roommates, siblings – while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In “That Is Shocking,” a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote” and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world.

Written with crystalline prose and sly humour, the stories in I Meant It Once build to complete a profoundly recognizable portrait of early adulthood and the ways in which seemingly incidental moments can come to define the stories we tell ourselves. For fans of Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, and Melissa Bank, these stories about being young and adrift in today’s world go down easy and pack a big punch.

Kate Doyle is the author of I Meant It Once, published by Corsair in the UK and Algonquin Books in the US. A former bookseller and a 2021 A Public Space Fellow, her short stories have been published in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Joyland, The Millions, and elsewhere. She has lived in New York City, Amsterdam, and Ithaca, New York.