This month, we’re jumping on the (admittedly correct, for once) bandwagon and reading the gay internet’s current literary fixation, Fruit Fly by Josh Silver !!

​A book that genuinely pulled me out of a hella reading slump, it follows Mallory Maddox, a literary one-hit-wonder who has spent 7 years trying to recreate the success of her fame-inducing debut. That is, until she cracks the perfect marketable formula:

gay + sad = bestseller

​Mallory downloads Grindr​, an imagination library of inspiration, and meets a young street kid battling addiction​ named Leo​ — it’s just the story she’s been looking for. As she mines his experiences for her novel, Leo too begins to see opportunities in exploiting Mallory’s fascination, collapsing the boundaries between observer and participant and threatening to unravel more than just a career.

Told in alternating perspectives, Fruit Fly is at once a biting satire on contemporary publishing and a​ genuinely unsettling ​psychological thriller, refusing to turn addiction or queerness into tasteful literary trauma. Instead, it asks what happens when suffering becomes a commodity, and what people are willing to sacrifice in order to be heard.

Because #ally is not a title given, but earned.