Penny Lee has spent eighteen years being unremarkable on purpose. High school was a nonevent, her boyfriend never learned anything true about her, and her mother Celeste treats her more like a roommate than a daughter. College in Austin is meant to be the clean break: seventy-nine miles from home, a writing programme, and a chance to be someone she picks herself.
Sam Becker is twenty-one and stuck — financially, romantically, and literally, since he lives in a storage room above House Coffee, where he bakes. He wants to make documentaries. Instead he is broke, newly sober, and absorbing the news that his ex-girlfriend Lorraine is pregnant. When Penny finds him on the pavement in the middle of his first panic attack, he cannot afford an ambulance, so she stays. She is also, as it happens, the roommate of Jude — Sam's niece.
They exchange numbers, and the friendship that follows takes place almost entirely on their phones. Texting lets them be braver than they are in person: Penny writes about her mother and about a night she has never told anyone about; Sam writes about his own mother and about the drinking he is trying to leave behind. The distance is the point. It is also the problem.
Mary H. K. Choi's debut novel, a New York Times bestseller, is told in alternating chapters and built out of screenshots, drafts and half-sent messages. It is a romance about two people who are bad at intimacy learning to be friends first, and a sharp, unsentimental portrait of a Korean American girl figuring out what she owes her family and what she owes herself.