A deeply intimate consideration of the inevitability of loss, the mystery of desire, and the work of being a woman

SAY SAY SAY
by Lila Savage
Knopf, TBA
Agent: The Gernert Company

Ella is in her early 30s, partnered with a woman, aimless in her creative pursuits, with an accidental career as a home health care aide. Bryn is in his 60s and no longer able to take care of his wife, Jill, who has been in decline since a traumatic brain injury a decade before, on his own. “It was sad,” Ella thinks upon meeting them, “but then it was always sad, or else she wouldn’t be needed.”
But this job enmeshes Ella in her clients’ lives in a way no other has before, and she becomes unable to bear the thought of letting them—and, unexpectedly, Bryn in particular—go. After barely one hundred pages, the story arrives at a quietly devastating climax, as Ella tries to make sense of her feelings while she still has the chance to express them.

Lila Savage is originally from Minneapolis. She received a Wallace Stegner fellowship for fiction, and graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.