Less
Andrew Sean Greer
The warmth under the wit; the rueful self-skewering comedy; the protagonist whose evasions are the engine.
A novel · comic-satirical literary fiction · ~102,000 words · complete
The woman who ghostwrites celebrity apologies can't won't be able to write her own.
GARRETT MUND — STATEMENT, DRAFT 4 (FOR READING)
To the people who worked in my kitchens. I'm sorry. I lost the room.
[margin: he cannot say "I was wrong." Lawyers. Make him say he lost the room — sounds like a man, not a defendant.]
I built a room where I could be the only one allowed to feel anything.
[margin: cut. too true. he'll never read it.]
The book
Mona Faye Okoro is the best ghostwriter of celebrity apologies in a business no one admits exists. The disgraced chef who can't stop yelling, the senator with eleven competing lawsuits, the wellness guru who wants to seem humbled while trademarking her apology hashtag — they all come to her firm, where the motto is we don't make this go away; we make you the kind of person it happened to.
Mona can teach a man to cry on exactly the right word. She knows that “I'm devastated” outperforms “I'm sorry” by nine points. She is the most articulate woman alive, and she knows it's a symptom.
Then two envelopes arrive in the same week: a philanthropist so radioactive his redemption could make or end her career — and a wedding invitation from the half-sister whose life Mona detonated, fifteen years ago, with one true, unforgivable sentence she never took back. By day she engineers the most cynical apology of her life. By night she sits down to write the one she owes, and finds the words won't come.
She can phrase anything except the sentence that matters.
A wickedly funny, devastatingly sharp novel about the one industry that monetizes the thing that's supposed to be free.
“Specifics are liability. Give them a flinch, not a confession.”
“Apologize for the feeling, never the fact. Bridge the gap with grammar.”
“There is no apology. There's only the next thing they're allowed to want from you.”
The deck
The narrator's dazzling fluency is built, from page one, to break: the funniest book on the shelf ends on its plainest, most disarming sentence — the one true thing said so badly that, for the first time, no one can mistake it for craft.
Comps
Andrew Sean Greer
The warmth under the wit; the rueful self-skewering comedy; the protagonist whose evasions are the engine.
R. F. Kuang
The acid satire of a status industry, narrated by a corrosive, self-incriminating voice you can't stop rooting for.
Julia May Jonas
The brilliant, fluent woman narrating her own undoing in prose so controlled the loss of control becomes the climax.
Warmth under Less; acid from Yellowface; the controlled unraveling of Vladimir.
The opening
Meet Mona at full power — the remorse readings, the micro-expression consultant who sells the recipe for a real smile, the folder of true things people paid her to delete, and the four words she can't say.
Read the opening →Full manuscript available on request.
Colophon
The Sorry Business was conceived, drafted, reviewed, edited, and packaged for publication by a coordinated team of autonomous agents — a showrunner holding the vision and the canon, a writer drafting in scene, a continuity tracker guarding the timeline, reviewers and editors running arc-by-arc passes, and a publisher assembling the manuscript and building this site. Thirty chapters, ~102,000 words, one engine: by day she manufactures other people's remorse for money; by night she fails to manufacture her own.