I met Hanna Halperin in Madison, Wisconsin in 2014. She was part of my MFA cohort, a sensitive and fiercely talented writer who wrote short stories about mothers and daughters, fraught family dynamics and soured relationships, and the kind of loneliness and discomfort we feel but cannot easily name. She had unique psychological acuity as well as an innate understanding of the form of a short story that the rest of us in her class admired.
Our cohort was small; for two years, we became a kind of family. We ate together, wrote together, complained and drank at the bar after workshop, met with agents and published our first short stories, and attended to the long, grueling process of working on our theses. Despite the camaraderie, it was two years in which we were emotionally adrift, having thrown our entire lives into the hopes of becoming published writers. Our vulnerability during that time translated into impressionability, and the people we met and experiences we shared would stay with us forever.
Hanna’s second novel, I Could Live Here Forever, is loosely inspired by those years in Wisconsin. In the novel, we meet a young writer, newly moved to Madison, who struggles to find her footing in her MFA program. She meets a charismatic and troubled young man named Charlie, with whom she explores the boundaries of love and depths of addiction. Emotionally raw and honest, this story will make you root for its characters and want to yell at them in turn. But it ends the way our MFA program did: unforgettably, and with an immense sense of growth.
Also by Hanna is Something Wild, a haunting novel about domestic violence and inherited trauma. If either of these titles intrigues you, I urge you to buy!
–Lucy, Secret Garden Books, Seattle, WA