For You and Only You: A Joe Goldberg Novel

by Caroline Kepnes

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Caroline Kepnes’s anti-hero Joe Goldberg is back for the fourth time. Who claims that “the third time is a charm?" Everyone’s favorite stalker will set the record straight.

New York Times bestselling author Caroline Kepnes, whose acclaimed YOU series inspired the hit show on Netflix, follows “addictively charming antihero” (The Washington Post) Joe Goldberg to the hallowed halls of Harvard, where he leaves crimson in his wake.
 
“Twisted . . . delightfully creepy.”—Rolling Stone

A POPSUGAR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Joe Goldberg is ready for a change. Instead of selling books, he’s writing them. And he’s off to a good start. Glenn Shoddy, an acclaimed literary author, recognizes Joe’s genius and invites him to join a tight-knit writing fellowship at Harvard. Finally, Joe will be in a place where talent matters more than pedigree . . . where intellect is the great equalizer and anything is possible. Even happy endings. Or so he thinks, until he meets his already-published, already-distinguished peers, who all seem to be cut from the same elitist cloth.

Thankfully, Wonder Parish enters the picture. They have so much in common. No college degrees, no pretensions, no stories from prep school or grad school. Just a love for literature. If only Wonder could commit herself to the writing life, they could be those rare literary soulmates who never fall prey to their demons. Wonder has a tendency to love, to covet, but Joe is a believer in the rule of fiction: If you want to write a book, you have to kill your darlings.

With her trademark satirical, biting wit, Caroline Kepnes explores why vulnerable people bring out the worst in others as Joe sets out to make this small, exclusive world a fairer place. And if a little crimson runs in the streets of Cambridge . . . who can blame him? Love doesn’t conquer all. Often, it needs a little push.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593133828
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Series:	You , #4
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	35,590
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Caroline Kepnes is the author of You, Hidden Bodies, Providence, You Love Me, and numerous short stories. Her work has been translated into a multitude of languages and inspired a television series adaptation of You, currently on Netflix. Kepnes graduated from Brown University and previously worked as a pop culture journalist for Entertainment Weekly and a TV writer for 7th Heaven and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. She grew up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

1

You think you’re special and you are, to a degree. You go to Harvard. A grad student if I had to guess. You wear a vintage T-­shirt that probably belonged to your father, who no doubt went here as well, carried you on his shoulders at his reunions when you were too young to wonder if you were good enough to get here. There was no need to worry. You were always going to wind up perched on the steps of the Barker Center in your flowery midi skirt. Little Miss Muffet with your Faulkner in your hands, open and your phone facedown, as if to prove that you prefer novels over nuisance. The world is your tuffet, the steps too, and you arch your back and aah. You’re not really lost in that book. You’re a little outside of yourself, yearning for someone new in September. I’m on the move. You tap your toes and lift your eyes—blue and horny—and you go there.

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

I know it hurts. You took a leap of faith, and I said thanks, but no thanks with a hey and walked into the Barker Center. I had to leave you. You women disappoint or disappear—or sometimes both—and none of you can bear to look at me once I know who you really are. You run, you try so hard to kill your feelings for me that you wind up dead in real life, dead inside. I’m not built like you. I never get over you, any of you. Something had to change, so I put all my feelings about my tragic, no-­good love stories into a blender and wrote a novel. That’s the reason I’m here. Not you. Me. I walk up to Barker 222 ready to join the ranks of the good and the terrible—Harvard monsters are a special breed—but a piece of paper is taped to the door: Too nice to be inside. See you fellows on the south side of the lawn! Yours, G.S.

I don’t want to go outside and sit in a room that isn’t a room—I want the Algonquin f***ing round table—and I expect better from Glenn “G.S.” Shoddy. He’s running this fiction writing fellowship because he’s the author of Scabies for Breakfast. He knows what makes people tick—Scabies earned him a Pulitzer—and he’s the anti-­Franzen—over two million copies sold, almost no one ticked off about his success. He’s my teacher, my mentor, the kind of guy who assured me that he too comes from a “humble” background . . . as in he grew up in the Mid-­f***ing-­west with married teacher parents who raised him to be a writer. I liked him for trying, and I (mostly) meant what I said when I sent him twenty pages of my soul.

Whether or not you offer me a spot, I want to thank you, Mr. Shoddy. I wouldn’t have started writing if I had never read your book. You’re exceptionally gifted, Glenn. Yours, Joe

Glenn did the right thing. He offered me a spot in the fellowship via a warm, chummy email, and Harvard is paying me to be here, so I follow the orders and hustle back outside like I’m late for a job interview—No, Joe, you got the job—I didn’t leave Florida to prowl around in the sun like a dirty old man playing Duck, Duck, F***ing Goose, but off I go.

I can do this. All I f***ing do is survive. I made it through the first few decades of my life and back in Orlando, when the world shut down, the first real snow days of my life, I took the break as a gift from my beloved, my would-­have-­been wife, Mary Kay DiMarco. She was gone, dead, and I had been wasting my time, slinging drinks and sulking, hooking up with girls who came into the bar, licked their lips, asked me about the last great book I read.

Predators, all of them, and that’s what I look like now, like I’m on the hunt for girls and no. No! “Sorry,” I say to a group of f***ing teenagers. “I’m just trying to find my people.”

They look right through me—the truth is always a bad share—and I need to Taylor Swift it, I need to calm down. I will find my fellows. I made RIP Mary Kay’s dream come true—I opened the Empathy Bordello Bar & Books—and I killed myself writing my book, finding a reader since it’s not really a book unless someone else consumes it. I killed myself again kissing up to the gatekeeper—You’re exceptionally gifted, Glenn—and when I sold the bar and hightailed it up I-­95 with the jukebox of RIP Mary Kay’s dreams in the back of a U-­Haul, well, that’s when multiple incompetent motorists almost killed me. No one knows how to drive anymore, or how to run a f***ing fellowship, but I made it. The skeletons in my closet aren’t so menacing anymore—the best writers all take risks—and I live here now, in a one-­bedroom two-­bath right by campus and I “go” here, but where the f***ing f*** are my fellows?

A guy in an MIT T-­shirt shouts, “Hey! Are you looking for the Shoddies?”

So that’s what we’re calling ourselves. Shoddies. Glenn’s not here yet and the guy tells me to pop a squat and jumps right back into conversation with a woman who doesn’t bother to turn around and check me out—weird—and the other three Shoddies are buried in a huddle and oh. I see. There was a plan to meet up before class and not one of my “fellows” gave me a heads-­up, and the ice is broken, the ice in their drinks is melted. It’s not like I expected to fall in love, but the possibility would be nice—I am human, I am single—and all three of my female fellows are Little Mrs. Tuffets. Visibly married. That’s a Duck, Duck, Never-­a-­ducking-­gain for this guy—and wait. That woman talking to the MIT guy. Is that? No. Yes. That’s Sarah Elizabeth Swallows. I know her, but I don’t. She’s a thriller queen—How to Kill Your Husband by The Wife—and I saw her face every day in the Bordello, beaming on the backs of her books and now here she is in real life, eating Wheat Thins out of a little plastic bag. Just . . . no.

But the other clique isn’t any better. The girl doing all the talking has a whiny Connecticunt kind of voice and she’s in a one-­up war with some douchebag in a Pringles T-­shirt. She met her hubby at Dartmouth and Pringles turned Dartmouth down to go to Tulane.

“My lady is magic,” he says. “Last night, she rescued a sparrow.”

The Dartmouth girl claps back. “Aw, Lou. My guy and I saved this parrot last year . . .”

Of course his name is Lou and the older woman, the one who they’re performing for, she says her daughter is a freshman here and then she takes off her sunglasses and wait . . . Is that? No. I will not play another round of I Know Her, But I Don’t in my f***ing head. I got a fellowship, same as them, and I drop my messenger bag on the grass.

“Sorry,” I say. “Are you Ani Platt?”

The one-­uppers eyeball me, and I was right. It is Ani Platt. “Oh no,” she says. “You must have seen that puff piece in the Globe . . .”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “But also . . . congrats on the Obie.”

The Dartmouth girl giggles. “Ani, I bet you didn’t expect to be signing autographs . . .”

I did not ask for an autograph and the Dartmouth girl ignores me, resumes telling the “story” of her honeymoon, so low-­key, just a few days at my dad’s place in Chilmark. I pop a squat in the dead zone. I got in, but I didn’t, and I knock over my own bag—f*** you, bag, f*** you, foot—and it takes a half-­empty cup of coffee-­water down with it. Great.

I grab the cup—servants gonna servant—and the Dartmouth girl makes obligatory eye contact with my forehead. “It’s okay,” she says. “I am, too.” I don’t know what’s so funny—the Shoddies are all chuckling—and she looks at me like I’m ringing up her groceries, like she has diamonds on the soles of her clogs. “Literally,” she says. “That’s my name. I’m O.K.”

A normal person would ask about me now, but she’d rather listen to Lou wax on about his honeymoon. They went off the grid—how original!—and Ani Platt eats people like this up in her plays, and maybe that’s why she’s encouraging them? For material? I could pry my way into the conversation—I killed a girl from Nantucket!—but there’s no f***ing point. You can make one person love you, but you can’t make a group of people like you, not when they already have each other, when they are a “them” in a way that makes you a “you.” I take my phone out of my bag and I go to the fellowship website and there it is, The Big Lie:

I want to discover undiscovered writers. I don’t care where or if you went to college. I don’t care if you have an MFA. I don’t care about your publications. Just send me your guts.

Yours,

Glenn Shoddy

Editorial Reviews

Joe Goldberg lives on. . . . For You and Only You delivers everything a fan could want. . . . Yes, it’s a book about writing books, and yes it’s very meta. . . . Kepnes obviously knows the world well, so the zingers land with authenticity. . . . What makes For You and Only You stand out is how pitch-perfect Joe’s voice is when he’s ‘talking’ to the Wonder who lives in his head. . . . [Joe’s] voice is so confident that at times Kepnes puts it in all caps and it feels right. . . . Joe is an addictively charming antihero and after four books, he still feels fresh and original.”—The Washington Post

“Compulsively readable and laugh-out-loud funny.”—The Boston Globe

“Hard to put down . . . another witty, irresistible mashup of crime fiction and romance, crafted with care and slicked with satire . . . Kepnes dissects that disturbing trope [of stalkers as romantic] with an icy scalpel . . . Kepnes’s group portrait of the workshop members and their dynamics is comedy gold. . . . The plot twists keep on coming, so fast Joe’s wisecracks can hardly keep up, barreling toward a truly surprising finale. The key to For You and Only You, and all of this series, is Joe’s unmistakable voice, seductive and sharp and, once we realize we’ve fallen for it, frightening.”—Tampa Bay Times

“Kepnes gleefully portrays the most back-stabbing seminar yet, dropping literary names with abandon as she twists the plot. Joe Goldberg might be a narcissistic, manipulative, murderous, utterly unreliable narrator, but he’s damn entertaining.”—Kirkus Review (starred review)
 
“Puckish . . . Kepnes waggishly satirizes the publishing industry, and her outsized characters’ egos and anxieties lay the foundations for delightfully deranged plot twists. . . . Joe’s stream-of-consciousness narration engages throughout, rendering readers both confidante and accomplice. Kepnes reliably entertains.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Within this intensity, [Joe Goldberg’s] snark-laden observations about ego, love, and loyalty ring true.”—Booklist

From the Publisher

02/06/2023

Bestseller Kepnes’s puckish fourth Joe Goldberg novel (after 2021’s You Love Me) finds the obsessive serial killer at Harvard after a fictionalization of all his “tragic, no-good love stories” earns him entry into author Glenn Shoddy’s writing fellowship. Joe assumes the other “Shoddies” will be undiscovered autodidacts like himself; instead, most are accomplished elitists. The only other misfit is Wonder Parish, a working-class Bostonian who manages a Dunkin’ Donuts and lives with her family. Joe knows he and Wonder are destined to become a literary power couple; he just has to remove all obstacles to their relationship, then convince an insecure Wonder and a derisive Glenn of Wonder’s potential—and of Joe’s brilliance. The Shoddies’ fixation on a whodunit podcast linked to Joe’s past vexes, but he knows how to handle complications: one murder at a time. Kepnes waggishly satirizes the publishing industry, and her outsized characters’ egos and anxieties lay the foundations for delightfully deranged plot twists. The book feels overlong, but Joe’s stream-of-consciousness narration engages throughout, rendering readers both confidante and accomplice. Kepnes reliably entertains. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2023-02-24
Has serial killer Joe Goldberg finally met his match—in a creative writing class?

In the previous three books in this series, beginning with You (2014), hopeless romantic and occasional murderer Joe has found himself in perilous situations. But who knew the most terrifying yet would be a creative writing fellowship at Harvard? Joe has written a novel, titled—what else?—Me, and has finagled himself into a workshop headed by Glenn Shoddy, author of a critically acclaimed novel called Scabies for Breakfast. Joe discovers that most of his fellows in the workshop are real writers, not just aspiring—Ani is an Obie-winning playwright, Sarah Beth the author of a successful mystery series. Mats and Lou have both completed promising first books, and nepo baby O.K. hasn’t finished writing a book yet, but her mother is an NPR star. Shoddy himself comes to class in bike shorts and talks more about his rides than his writing. But, of course, Joe finds a soul mate in the lovely Wonder Parish, who’s just as insecure about her place in the seminar as Joe is. She still lives with her blue-collar family, caring for her wounded veteran dad and managing a Dunkin’. And she is, as Joe sees when he starts reading her manuscript, Faithful, a truly gifted writer. He is soon madly in love with her, and she responds, although their affair doesn’t go smoothly. Joe has other things to worry about, too. One is a podcast that's the topic of lively discussion in the seminar: The Body on Bainbridge—a body Joe knows too much about. When you leave as many unsolved murders in your wake as he has, someone is bound to do a true-crime show about one of them. Another is Shoddy’s wife, the aptly named Sly, who has her own secrets. When the bodies start dropping, Joe has to wonder if he’s the only killer in class. Kepnes gleefully portrays the most back-stabbing seminar yet, dropping literary names with abandon as she twists the plot.

Joe Goldberg might be a narcissistic, manipulative, murderous, utterly unreliable narrator, but he’s damn entertaining.

Kirkus Reviews