Don’t Look at me

When an ex-basketball star and poetry aficionado discovers lost love letters from Emily Dickinson to an unknown Irish lover, she must confront academic conformism and risk embarrassing exposure in order to defend larger truths about American culture in a nation still divided by war.

Meet Holly Winegarten, a campus celebrity and painfully self-conscious young woman trying to come to terms with being six feet, nine inches tall. Sidelined by injury from a basketball career, she develops an affinity for literature and accidentally discovers secret correspondence by an American literary icon famed for her self-effacement. Holly learns that Emily Dickinson’s clandestine lover was an immigrant Irish workingman who served as a wartime substitute for her cherished brother, Austin. Holly’s discoveries make her the envy of academic careerists, who aren’t afraid to play dirty.

Also on Holly’s mind: the future of her own misfit brother, Honus, her relationship with her father and coach, Art, and her unexpected friendship with a reviled professor. Holly longs for intimacy in a world where appearances rule, and she must find a way to push back against a university compromised by intellectual fashions and insulated from Americans who serve in today’s foreign wars.

Humorous and poignant, Don’t Look at Me is an unblinking portrait of how literature still excites and disrupts our lives.