Library Journal - Audio
06/01/2022
College freshman Mallory meets an older woman at her university gym. She turns out to be a professor at the university where Mallory is a student, and Mallory is drawn in by the woman's brilliance, eccentricities, and aloofness toward the world. Still grieving the recent death of her mother, Mallory and the mysterious woman form a bond based on mutual losses. Though the affair is short-lived, the seductive tension of the relationship affects Mallory, her life, and her relationships for years to come. The naïveté of Mallory and the seductiveness of the woman are brilliantly portrayed by narrator Barrie Kreinik. The novel handles the topics of young love, grief, power imbalance, and regret in a sensitive and subtle manner, often letting listeners come to their own conclusions. VERDICT This debut novel packs an emotional punch, exploring how relationships affect the people we become and the choices we make throughout our lives.—Elyssa Everling
JULY 2022 - AudioFile
Told in three arresting sections, this poignant novel details a life-changing affair between 19-year-old Mallory and an older, married woman who is a professor at her college. Kreinik’s delicate narration mimics the sparse beauty of Hart’s prose. She lingers on scenes and sentences, letting them stretch out in time, as they do for Mallory. Though this intensely interior story is focused on Mallory’s inner turmoil, Kreinik excels at bringing the characters to life. She captures Mallory’s yearning to be loved and her increasing feelings of desperation. Her lover, whom Mallory refers to only as “the woman,” has a lilting German accent—polished and assured, at times cutting, at times playful. The differences between them—and maybe what draws them to each other—become powerfully obvious in Kreinik’s performance. L.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/14/2022
Hart debuts with a transfixing queer coming-of-age novel about a woman’s affair with a much older professor. Mallory Green is in her first year at a college on Long Island shortly after her mother’s death from cancer in 2008. There, she becomes fixated on a never-named woman who teaches children’s literature. The professor, who is brusque but encouraging in their conversations, invites Mallory over for dinner. Her husband is away, and she makes plain her own attraction to Mallory. Despite feeling “embarrassed, as if she’d written an intense journal entry that she now had to read aloud,” Mallory plunges into an affair with her. The woman ends it when her professor husband returns at the end of the semester, leaving Mallory floundering as she attempts to date a male student and later drifts through postgraduation life in New York City. A flashback to Mallory’s youth traces her close friendship with a neighbor girl, saturated with frustrated desire. The professor’s reappearance four years after graduation, just as Mallory is settling into a new relationship, opens old wounds. Mallory’s intense interiority and self-consciousness will remind readers of Sally Rooney’s work, and Hart’s prose is delicate and piercing. This is auspicious and breathtaking. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Company. (May)
From the Publisher
Hart has written a realistic world where women do all the talking, to each other, and rarely about the men in their lives.... Hart’s novel does something exceptional that few pieces of fiction have done successfully: She presents the older married professor as not only a complicated figure worthy of desire and suspicion, but makes her a woman too.... We Do What We Do in the Dark has flashes of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, or Halle Butler’s The New Me. Sometimes it’s erotic, sometimes it’s devastating. Maybe this is what the new erotic thriller has morphed into in literature.... [T]he writing always crackles, written by someone who clearly knows what it’s like to desire another woman in ways you just barely understand." –New York Times
“Hart debuts with a transfixing queer coming-of-age novel about a woman’s affair with a much older professor….. Mallory’s intense interiority and self-consciousness will remind readers of Sally Rooney’s work, and Hart’s prose is delicate and piercing. This is auspicious and breathtaking.” – Publishers Weekly *STARRED review*
“Michelle Hart’s first novel is a haunting study of solitude and connection, moving and memorable.”
– Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings
“Seductive and lyrical with poetic detail, this is an unforgettable account of a forbidden romance made extraordinary by Hart's precision and lyrical touch. A compulsive read that satisfies and haunts.”
– Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun
“Michelle Hart’s coming-of-age novel skillfully depicts forbidden romance and the shame it can foster.” –Time
“An electric debut.” – Marie Claire
"It is a rare debut that exhibits the authority of voice and vision that Michelle Hart gives us in We Do What We Do In The Dark."
– Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
“A gorgeous storyteller, Hart is gifted with a poet’s precision, blending image and idea. Sensual and wise, this novel channels the melancholic exhilaration of dangerous love.”
– Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
“A beautiful book so filled with sharp longing and perfectly phrased vulnerability that I read it in a reverent hush.”
– Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“Reading this brilliant book is like holding a fierce yet trembling bird in your cupped hand, every page causes a tremble in your heart. You can’t put it down.”
– Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life
Library Journal
12/01/2021
First-year college student Mallory is mourning her mother's death when she begins an affair with an older married woman who's brilliant, accomplished, and self-assured—everything Mallory wants to be. Having comfortably hidden away in their relationship, Mallory must decide as an adult whether she wants finally to face the world. From the assistant books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine.
JULY 2022 - AudioFile
Told in three arresting sections, this poignant novel details a life-changing affair between 19-year-old Mallory and an older, married woman who is a professor at her college. Kreinik’s delicate narration mimics the sparse beauty of Hart’s prose. She lingers on scenes and sentences, letting them stretch out in time, as they do for Mallory. Though this intensely interior story is focused on Mallory’s inner turmoil, Kreinik excels at bringing the characters to life. She captures Mallory’s yearning to be loved and her increasing feelings of desperation. Her lover, whom Mallory refers to only as “the woman,” has a lilting German accent—polished and assured, at times cutting, at times playful. The differences between them—and maybe what draws them to each other—become powerfully obvious in Kreinik’s performance. L.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-02-05
A sad and lonely young woman has a formative affair with a married female professor at her college.
"The college was mostly a commuter school, and on nights and weekends it was as if two-thirds of the students simply vanished, like the Rapture. Lacking both a car and an interest in bars, Mallory felt at once claustrophobic and isolated, a feeling with which she had been familiar for most of her life." In tightly controlled, flattened prose that seems to match the emotional weather of her protagonist, Hart's debut observes the coming-of-age of Mallory Green. After a post–high school gap year notable only for the death of her mother, Mallory chooses a college because it was the name on a sweatshirt worn by a kindergarten classmate whose younger sibling strangled on a Venetian blind cord: "In his extreme grief, he seemed more interesting to her." She makes no friends, at least at first, but she does have an obsessive relationship with a professor whose husband is out of town for a year. Though Mallory has known she was gay since childhood, this is her first sexual experience. Nonetheless, the mentorship "the woman" (we only ever know her as "the woman") offers has more to do with managing a personality inclined to isolation and misery and occasional meanness than with being gay. “I have slept with other women, yes. But I’m not like you. We are alike in many ways, but not that one," the woman tells her. In fact, she will be getting back together with her husband as soon as he comes home. Mallory asks how they are alike then, though actually she already knows. “You and I," says the woman, "we do what we do in the dark and then we deal with it all alone.”
Not a #MeToo story; instead, something more delicate and strange and, at this point, more interesting.
