Every two years, a woman abandons her life and starts a new one and is never sorry.

HOW TO QUIT
by Genevieve Sly Crane
Gallery/Simon & Schuster, Summer 2021
(chez Sterling Lord Literistic)

Credit: Andrew Baris

Cricket Waller collected her own lives. Her first missing person flyer showed her with braces. Her second came from her life in New Mexico, when she’d called herself Leah. Her third flyer, taken from Manhattan, had been hardest to find. Everyone goes missing in Manhattan, but Cricket didn’t consider the other people who collected her flyers: Her husbands. Her boyfriend. Her parents. Her son.

Genevieve Sly Crane was the Pledge Mistress of her own sorority. She graduated from Stony Brook University with her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature in 2013. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review and American Short Fiction. Her story “Endings, Bright and Ugly” was a finalist in the 2017 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. She teaches in the Department of English at Monroe College.