We Have Attempted to Contact You and Have Failed on Several Occasions (Essays)

Jax Connelly’s debut prose collection, a memoir in essays and experiments, subverts traditional nonfiction expectations by queering form, theme, and genre. Some of these essays are straightforward, juxtaposing quiet scenes from mundane aftermaths: breaking up, turning thirty. And some are disruptive, disrupted, enlisting elements like erasure, white space, and run-on sentences to construct a reading experience representative of something ineffable: liminal queer intimacies and unresolved familial wounds, the shifting facts of a dysphoric body over time. Eroding boundaries between longing and belonging, dark moods and dark humor, big ideas and ordinary observations, these fifteen essays dip in and out of subjects ranging from food waste and black holes to high school softball and a rescue dog who won’t eat. The result is a reckoning with the fallibility of memory, “truth” in its slipperiest forms, and the “I”-making stories we tell about our pasts in order to survive them.