Bitter Texas Honey

The Royal Tenenbaums meets Fleabag in this hilarious and dizzyingly smart debut about an over-the-top evangelical Texan family--and the daughter at its center racing to finish her very important novel before her ex-boyfriend finishes his.

It’s 2011, and twenty-three-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, God-loving family. Sure, she listens to conservative talk radio on her way to and from her internship at the Capitol. But she was once an America-hating leftist who kissed girls at parties, refused to shave, and had plenty of emotionless sex with jazz school friends--that is until a drug-induced mania forced her to return to her senses.

But above all Joan is a writer, an artist, or at least she desperately wants to be. Always in search of inspiration for her novel, she catalogs every detail of her relationships with men--including with her former muse slash current arch nemesis Roberto--and mines her very dysfunctional family for material. But when her beloved, credit card debt-racked cousin Wyatt finds himself in crisis, Joan’s worldview is cracked open and everything comes crashing down.

Funny, whip-smart, and often tender, Bitter Texas Honey introduces us to the unforgettable and indefatigable Joan West: ambitious, full of contradictions, utterly herself. As she wades through it all--addiction, politics, loss, and, notably, her father’s string of increasingly bizarre girlfriends--we witness her confront what it means to be a person, and an artist, in the world.

Ashley Whitaker is a writer from Texas. She received an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in Tin House and StoryQuarterly, and has received support from the Ragdale Foundation. She lives in Austin with her husband and children.