CITY BOYS.

Literary Nonfiction | Essay Collection
Status: Writing first draft
Setting: New York City
Themes: memory, friendship, intimacy, patterns, self-reckoning,
desire, emotional aftermath

A literary essay collection about men, memory, heartbreak, and the patterns we keep mistaking for love.

city boys. is a collection of interconnected true stories about the men who shaped one woman’s life in New York City, not through sweeping romances, but through friendships, fleeting encounters, restaurant shifts, late-night conversations, and the quiet ways people leave marks on each other.

Set against the backdrop of downtown bars, tiny apartments, crowded trains, and the chaos of the restaurant industry, each chapter centers a different man: an actor who inspired a move to the city, coworkers who became lifelines, men who demanded too much, men who offered unexpected kindness, and the ones who made home feel either safer or lonelier.

Braided throughout are pieces of the narrator’s own history: her early writing life, addiction, mental illness, family dynamics, unstable love, and the ongoing search for belonging in a city that can both devour and remake you.

Tender, messy, funny, and deeply human, city boys. is ultimately not a book about romance at all. It is about memory, survival, and the versions of ourselves that are born through the people we meet along the way.

For Readers Who Like:
Personal essays, emotional autopsy, New York City relationships,
sharp self-reflection, messy desire, dark humor, heartbreak with
analysis, and nonfiction that turns old wounds into something readable
instead of just leaving them to hiss in the corner.