Open Reading Period Selection

Price range: $9.95 through $16.95

ISBN: 978-1-62557-713-9
Catalog: Black Lawrence Press

I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych

Nina Boutsikaris

Publication Date: May 1, 2019

Description

Listen to Nina Boutsikaris read from I’M TRYING TO TELL YOU I’M SORRY: AN INTIMACY TRIPTYCH // Watch the captioned video on the BLP YouTube Channel

 

I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry is a hybrid memoir that explores identity, gender, intimacy, and the complexities of telling one’s own story. Blending personal narrative, lyrical prose, and meta-commentary on art, performance and perception, the book refuses traditional linear storytelling in favor of fragmented, self-reflective vignettes.

At its core, I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry traces the author’s experiences as a woman navigating relationships, sexuality, illness, loneliness, vulnerability, and the act of being seen—both by others and by herself. Boutsikaris often situates her identity in relation to others—particularly men—and interrogates how her sense of self has been shaped by performance, desire, and trauma. Through various episodes, she recounts moments of self-erasure and redefinition. Boutsikaris creates a powerful portrait of a self in flux, always in the process of becoming, and always questioning whether that process can ever be honestly captured.

Nina Boutsikaris’s memoir is an intimate, experimental exploration of womanhood and the elusive nature of truth.

Praise

No one is safe from Nina Boutsikaris’ gaze in this book-she looks at the world and people around her just as intensely as she turns her gaze inward, questioning her desires, her actions, and asking what it means to see something for what it truly is. I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry pairs art with experience, youth with introspection, and gender with power-the dance between these topics makes for an utterly absorbing read.

-Chelsea Hodson

I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry is not so much a memoir as an experience. Be prepared to fully immerse yourself in a world that’s both gorgeous and dangerous, led by a guide who has found herself at the outermost edges of what language can bear. I’ve never read anything quite like it. Nina Boutsikaris is a compelling new voice in creative nonfiction.

-Brenda Miller

An intelligent and radical rumination on gender, sexuality, fear, and romance. A topical and evocative book for anyone with a brain.

-Chloe Caldwell

About the Author

Nina Boutsikaris

I'm Trying to Tell You I'm Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych was the winner of the 2021 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Small Press Distribution Bestseller. Nina Boutsikaris' essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Third Coast, Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere, and were listed among the Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2019 and Best American Essays 2016. Her short memoir “Surrender” was anthologized in the book The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction. Other awards and honors include The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellowship, Redivider's Beacon Street Prize for Nonfiction, and Writer-in-Resident at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. She has taught at The University of Arizona, Eugene Lang College, Catapult, and Gotham Writers Workshop. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley and is at work on a novel.

Visit Author Page