In her debut story collection, Julia Ridley Smith navigates the currents and eddies of desire, sex, love, and relationships.
These twelve highly accomplished stories are witty and accessible, intelligent and thought-provoking. A girls’ week at the beach prompts hot tub drinking, awkward confessions, and a poignant reconsideration of friendship. A caregiver extracts a small repayment from her elderly patient for his long-forgotten role in the demise of her family. A young woman, new to New York City, finds herself in a complex but tacky love affair and reckons with the unfolding plot of her life. In the title story, a woman plots to conceive a second child while at a convention hotel with her husband and teenage daughter, both of whom have other plans. Smith’s stories will beguile and delight readers while at the same time exploring the deep and often difficult ties of family, marriage, and romantic love in modern life.
“Sex Romp Gone Wrong is a dazzlingly inventive collection, and Julia Ridley Smith writes so beautifully about the intensity of being alive, of wanting more than you can have, of navigating the absurdity of the world with various degrees of success. You’d be hard pressed to find a writer who is so genuinely funny and yet knows the exact moment to turn that humor towards a moment of realization so deeply felt that you have to read the line again. I can’t think of a better compliment for Smith’s stories than the simple fact that you will want to read them over and over.”
—Kevin Wilson, Now Is Not the Time to Panic and Nothing to See Here
“Sex Romp Gone Wrong doesn’t read like a debut collection; there isn’t a weak story in the bunch, not a single false note. Julia Ridley Smith does a radical thing: she writes about invisible people, like middle-aged mothers, and every story is vibrantly its own thing, and every character trembles on a knife’s edge between hilarity and rage. Actually, that’s the book: laugh-out-loud funny, heartbreaking, and almost uncomfortably, infuriatingly wise.”
–Holly Goddard Jones, Antipodes and The Salt Line
“Julia Ridley Smith’s stories are as funny as they are wise. From a woman on a fiftieth birthday “girls’ weekend” reckoning with the personal implications of the #metoo era to a teenage girl navigating the dangers and thrills of young adulthood from the very hotel bar that’s hosting her father’s IT conference, these stories tackle questions of love, loss, sexuality, and the complex legacies of race and class in the modern South. Keen-eyed and tender, Smith writes characters with a generosity and humor that mark her as one of the best new voices in short fiction. Sex Romp Gone Wrong is a delight of a collection. This is the debut I’ve been waiting for!”
–Joanna Pearson, Now You Know It All and Bright and Tender Dark
“In Sex Romp Gone Wrong, Smith creates a perfect blend of laugh-out-loud humor and profound pathos as she imagines women’s lives gone wrong (and occasionally oh-so-right). The stories in the collection range from formally experimental to deftly executed realism and every one brings complex characters to life through vivid detail and endless empathy. I’m glad to be carrying these women and these worlds with me.”
–Gwen E. Kirby, Shit Cassandra Saw