by Kate Torode
A darkly funny, emotionally resonant debut about cracking open your life to find what’s real inside, Chicken Nugget Girl and Other Midlife Traumas is equal parts catharsis and chaos. Perfect for fans of heartfelt humor, awkward resilience, and snacks-as-coping-mechanisms.
Mallory Reynolds is not okay.
She’s thirty-eight, married, overextended, and deeply committed to pretending everything is fine. Her job at OmniGenTech involves color-coding spreadsheets and slowly dissolving into a puddle of passive-aggressive corporate jargon. Her hobbies include hoarding unfinished sketchbooks, writing personal essays she never shares, and quietly unraveling behind a very professional bob haircut. Then one day, she doesn’t pretend. She quits. With no plan, limited savings, and a truly unnecessary amount of oat milk, Mallory sets out to reinvent herself through writing, art, and radical midlife honesty. What follows is a wry, emotionally chaotic quest for joy, truth, and maybe a publishing deal—if she can survive the imposter syndrome, her mom’s guilt trips, and one particularly dramatic plumbing disaster.
Recovering Spreadsheet Goddess
Kate Torode is a writer, mixed-media painter, and recovering spreadsheet sorceress living her second act on the banks of the Mississippi in St. Louis. Her writing blends wit, warmth, and an affinity for existential snack food. When not building worlds or reworking punchlines, she’s painting, trapezing, being a self-proclaimed master puppeteer and laughing with her husband and five cats and navigating creative life with a mug of something warm and a strong local art community. This is her debut novel. She's already working on the sequel—whether anyone asked her to or not.