I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry
Black Lawrence Press
May 15, 2019
140 pages
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
2021 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction
Small Press Distribution Bestseller
Praise
No one is safe from Nina Boutsikaris’ gaze in this book—she looks at the world and people around her just as intensely as she turns her gaze inward, questioning her desires, her actions, and asking what it means to see something for what it truly is. I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry pairs art with experience, youth with introspection, and gender with power—the dance between these topics makes for an utterly absorbing read.
Be prepared to fully immerse yourself in a world that’s both gorgeous and dangerous, led by a guide who has found herself at the outermost edges of what language can bear. I’ve never read anything quite like it. Nina Boutsikaris is a compelling new voice in creative nonfiction.
An intelligent and radical rumination on gender, sexuality, fear, and romance. A topical and evocative book for anyone with a brain.
Visceral, empathetic, judgmental, kind, compassionate, searching -- this book embodies the dissonance of living in this world, what it means to feel so much in so many different directions, and to find any way to relate it to what has been felt before and what might be felt in the future.
Reviews
...words leak from Boutsikaris—words on family, fragility, art history, good sex, bad sex, desire, abuse, fidelity, friendship, theft, manipulation, friction—and they plink across the pages.
The attention of a beautiful young woman, the thinking goes, is intoxicating. A smile seems like so little, yet can cost so much.
Interviews
This is a writer willing to forgive the parts of her we read on page, and quietly asking us, the readers, to be as forgiving with ourselves.
I suppose I’m always attempting to do what all my favorite essayists do, which is to further illuminate or complicate a question, and for me that requires swooping and circling rather than marching down a straight, mown path. I honestly don’t know another way to write narrative nonfiction except through a lens of uncertainty and curiosity.
It’s interesting that in writing this book you’re archiving yourself, a woman. Is the writing of this book an act of violence towards your past self?
Featured by Leah Flannery in No Kill Magazine's Culture Dose column