Tangerapple

This lush, revelatory debut narrates the decades-spanning love story of two women across the divide of consciousness, as one lies immobilized and the other sits vigil by her bedside.

“Erlichman has a near-cosmic understanding of time, how every human life is winged by two infinities that are already always happening. . . . Ambitious, strange, sublime—it’s a major event.”
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

The intertwined eras of seventy-year-olds Penny and Florence—white and Black, a sound engineer and a painter—unfold before us in a world where deeply felt desires can manifest as physical objects. In 2018,  a mysterious tangerine-apple appears on the windowsill of Penny’s upstate New York hospital room, where she drifts in a coma as Florence paints and talks to her. Unable to reply (“All is mist. All is quickness. So I must speak from here”), Penny summons the 1970s, when meeting Florence, poolside in L.A. in an orange bikini, brought joyous fulfillment in the wake of her twin sister’s death; then their headlong 1980s in New York City, which saw Florence’s explosion as an artist, and the 1990s childhood of their miraculous daughter Gift, about whom Penny still holds a secret she may never be able to tell her wife. 

A lesbian domestic epic unique in our literary landscape, Tangerapple describes love both experienced across decades and lived in the moment. It celebrates communion between women as sisters, moms, and lovers, as it meditates on the power of mutual homemaking and artmaking, on grief and repair, on family given and chosen, and on a shared language beyond speech.