
Author Reading: Michelle Kicherer, with Emme Lund
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
BOLD is thrilled to host a reading with Michelle Kicherer, author of Sexy Life, Hello, in Conversation with Emme Lund, author of The Boy with a Bird in His Chest.
About Sexy Life, Hello:
A dark comedy about a nanny who doubles as a porn star’s sexter.
After getting fired from her job as a fourth-grade teacher, Jane takes on two jobs at once: as a nanny for twin babies and as a sexter for a famous porn star. Soon, Jane is feeding Franny and Zooey with one hand and shooting off ridiculous sexts with the other. At first, she feels it’s like a joke: a lot of her clientele are into scat play or “mystical bestiality.” By the end of her first month on the sexting-nanny jobs, Jane is making significantly more money than she could have ever made as a teacher. She sees a way to move out of her rundown childhood home on the California Central Coast; a way to finally have a nice place of her own. And it feels great—until Jane realizes she isn’t as anonymous as she thought.
SEXY LIFE, HELLO teeters between satire and literary thriller. Infused with creepy-gross moments reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh and Miranda July, a dark, twisting storyline in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith, and a dry wit uniquely Kicherer, this fascinating debut novella introduces a bold and exciting new voice in contemporary literature.
Michelle Kicherer is a fiction writer, manuscript consultant, and book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and Willamette Week. She is the author of the novella Sexy Life, Hello, which Kirkus Reviews gave a “Get It” recommendation and called “An eye-opening satire that is as cheeky as it is unsparing.” Her writing has been published in The Masters Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, 8142 Review, 580 Split, The Deli, The Bay Bridged, Forbes, SF Station, The Cutaway, Into The Void, Portland Monthly and many others. Michelle holds an MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College and is a writing instructor for Literary Arts, Litquake, Portland Community College, and Writing Workshops
Emme Lund is an author living and writing in Portland. She has an MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, TIME Magazine, The Rumpus, Romper, the Portland Mercury, and Autostraddle, among many other venues. In 2019, she was awarded an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Fiction. Her debut novel, The Boy with a Bird in His Chest(Atria Books, 2022) was longlisted for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction, was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award, was named a Best Book of the Year by Buzzfeed and The Portland Mercury, and was included on lists in The Washington Post, USA Today, People Magazine, The Advocate, Cosmopolitan, and Shondaland.