SARAH GERARD reads from her debut novel BINARY STAR

Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio)

Join us tonight at Skylight Books for the brilliant debut from a rising "star" (couldn't help it)  of fiction, Sarah Gerard!

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Sarah Gerard’s debut novel Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend, John. On a road trip around the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism and believe they’ve found a direction.

Though she has misgivings about their newfound ideology, the narrator’s involvement becomes critical to the couple’s plan to “take down the sick system.” Trapped in a self-destructive constellation of lies and self-defining, superficial obsessions, she forces herself to complete the semester while preparing the political “action” she and John have planned for the summer. Meanwhile, John’s drinking is spiraling out of control with dangerous results, and they’re closer together than ever.

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick; a society that sells diet pills and sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight, or too much weight, or put on weight; and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success—a cataclysmic story of the quest for perfection.

Praise for Binary Star

"Sarah Gerard's star is rising."--The Millions

"A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way."--Jenny Offill

"I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard's brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy, devastated, loving all of it."--Kate Zambreno

"Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard's young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity--ideological, mental, physical--comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is 'I want to look at the sky and understand.'"--Justin Taylor

"By now I've read Binary Star twice, and I've become so entwined with it that I'm reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I've never read anything like it."--Harry Mathews

"Allegorized by the phenomena of binary stars, Sarah Gerard's first novel confronts the symptoms of modern living with beauty and courage."--Simon Van Booy

Sarah Gerard's work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine's "The Cut," Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother and a graduate of The New School's MFA program for fiction.