“One of the themes of ‘Sunshine State,’ Sarah Gerard’s striking book of essays, is how Florida can unmoor you and make you reach for shoddy, off-the-shelf solutions to your psychic unease…. The first essay is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire…. This essay draws blood.”
— Dwight Garner, New York Times
“Stunning.”
— Rolling Stone
“In Sunshine State, her penetrating and deeply felt debut collection of essays… Gerard strikes just the right balance between objective distance and glimpsed emotion…. Unflinchingly candid memoir bolstered by thoughtfully researched history…. A nuanced and subtly intimate mosaic… Gerard juggles nostalgia, criticism, romance and violence with pitch-perfect pathos…. Her writing, lucid yet atmospheric, takes on a timeless ebb and flow.”
— Jason Heller, NPR.org
“Perfectly captures the idiosyncrasies of the Gulf Coast… [filled with] tragic-comic characters who embody the state’s combination of beauty, sadness, hope, and greed.…. The collection is part reportage, part millennial love letter to lost youth, a native daughter’s attempt to sharpen her understanding of self against the whetstone of history and society…. What slowly emerges throughout the course of Gerard’s searching is a clear-eyed dismantling of the American dream: the idea that we are the individual architects of our fates, each with the power to will for ourselves the lives we want, the abundance we desire — wealth we trust will lead to true happiness.”
— Anya Ventura, LA Review of Books
“Sarah Gerard’s essay collection Sunshine State offers a deeply intimate look at Florida and Gerard’s personal experiences growing up along its Gulf Coast. Gerard’s writing is entertaining and engaging throughout, exploring topics like addiction, incarceration, homelessness, and religion while highlighting the environmental and economic struggles (and her personal ones, both emotional and physical) of living in the state.”
— Buzzfeed
“Sarah Gerard’s essay collection, Sunshine State, embodies Florida’s unpredictability in the best sense. The essays are structurally intricate and ultraprecise in their depictions of both the physical and human worlds. Always intimate and never insular, they span a wide range of subjects—some trace the personal roots of family histories and youth and lost friendships, while others look outward to environmental conservation, religion, and homelessness.”
— Laura van den Berg, BOMB
“Gerard’s prose is unlabored, flatly observational, and the interwoven mini stories are at once tender and cold, exhilarating and regrettable—each undermining the one that precedes it.”
— Nicole Rudick, Paris Review
“Sunshine State treats Florida… as a frame of mind, a psychoactive landscape through which to wander, poking what Gerard sees until she can make sense of it. Her essays live in the nonfiction borderland, testing the limits of truth and fact. This is what gives it its momentum and deftness, …. Florida stands in for the American psyche, which is bleak and badly damaged, full of broken promises and loose and floating dreams, floods and winds that can knock out our power. What we find in the borderland, in lieu of real answers, is careful dissection, using facts alongside imagination and memory, of the country as it is, in order to understand how we got here, and where we’re going next.”
— Ellen O’Connell Whittet, Ploughshares
“Gerard’s writing has been described as ‘unflinching,’ but perhaps the better terms are ‘generous’ and ‘patient.’ Her patience is what gets her close enough to her subjects that she can round them out, exhibit their complexities, and her generosity is what keeps her from mocking them…. [The essays] work together to subvert the most common tropes about Florida’s antic madness. Instead they focus on humanizing the state’s inhabitants – inhabitants with hopes and dreams, who cope with systemic and visceral issues… who would ordinarily be flattened into condescending headlines.”
— Nick Moran, The Millions
“Gerard’s native Florida links the assembled eight essays, but the setting is just that – a backdrop against which Gerard exercises an admirable impulse for experimentation. ‘BFF’ is an extremely intimate autopsy of a childhood friendship. ‘The Mayor of Williams Park’ is an immersive profile told in the quasi-detached first person, of G.W. Rolle, a minister who serves free weekend lunch meals.”
— Kate Bolick, New York Times Book Review
“[Gerard] inserts herself into her stories in both highly personal ways and as a second party observer, leaving the reader with a map of her internal landscape as well as a Floridian topography. The combined effect is a bird’s eye view of the state at large. In Gerard’s work, the body is made of star stuff. The personal is political.”
— Liz von Klemperer, Electric Literature
“It takes someone with orange juice in their veins and alligators in their heart to truly bring the lessons of a place as complex as Florida to bear… [Sunshine State] dissects what Florida means to the United States with a nuance and complexity only someone who has lived in it—and, just as importantly, moved away from it—can provide…. Listing the home’s elevation, an accurate certificate is requisite to assessing the home’s risk of flood damage or, in the case of Florida, its chances of surviving into the next few decades…. Florida is the nation’s elevation certificate; consider Gerard our realtor.”
— B. David Zarley, Paste
“The author goes home in Gerard’s thorough, personal, and well-researched collection of essays on Florida, its inhabitants, and the ways they prey upon each another.”
— The Millions, Most Anticipated Books of the Year review
“The distinct nature of Florida and its undeniable, magnetic weirdness shines through somewhere in each essay. Yet, despite its title, that enigma of a state isn’t the focus. Gerard takes a magnifying glass to powerful characters, herself included, and the underlying truths she unravels could apply to any number of Americans. The reader becomes invested in the characters’ lives, at times torn between empathy and disdain, but nonetheless needing to know what becomes of them.”
— Becca Godwin, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Poignant and unflinching personal essays… paint a portrait of a state ravaged by economic hardship but enriched by cultural diversity…. [A] brilliant first collection.”
— Amy Brady, Shelf Awareness, starred review
“Sunshine State is a sort of memoir, its essays ranging widely in style and degree of intimacy…. [The title essay] is a haunting story… that Gerard tells with insight and skill… the first essay, ‘BFF,’ a simmering prose poem…. Florida is often played for laughs in literature, but Gerard knows it too well to do anything that simple. The shadows bring depth.”
— Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times
“Sarah Gerard is a Southern writer for the 21st century. In Sunshine State, the sacred lies right next to the profane; the weird is always inextricable from its own beauty. These essays reach out toward the people and places of Gerard’s childhood, family, and history while also reaching within to examine her own complicity in the creation of her life’s story.”
— Elizabeth Anderson, Indie Next Pick Recommendation
“Eight carefully researched, beautifully patterned, and vividly written essays…. Emotion-rich scenes from Gerard’s life stand alongside straightforward descriptions of historical events unencumbered by editorializing…. This thematic ambiguity and avoidance of the pithy message are qualities—in addition to the effective use of autobiographical scenes—that some of Gerard’s essays share with those of Joan Didion… [and] turns the book into an Everlasting Gobstopper for thought. Also like Didion’s essays (when they first appeared), Gerard’s are records of a recent past that will soon enough feel like history.”
— Ashley P. Taylor, Brooklyn Rail
“An amazing book.”
— Patty Yumi Cottrell, Goodreads Best Book of the Month Pick
“Sunshine State is a brutal and honest account of trying to grow up and find yourself when the past is always ready to drag you back under…. It is a book that left me gratefully gutted. Read it.”
— Leigh Lucas, A Woman’s Thing
“Gerard’s writing often feels anthropological in its sensitivity to detail and variation, yet she is not writing from a scientific remove; rather, she puts her entire self into the service of her art, concentrating with great care as she sets about clearing away the dirt and debris that cloud our perceptions of what’s right in front of us, and offering a vision of life, of friendship, of ambition, of belief, of Florida, that has a singular clarity and focus. In Sunshine State, Gerard offers readers a view into a world they might not have known existed, but now don’t necessarily want to leave, so vivid and lyrical is its expanse.”
— Kristin Iversen, NYLON
“Gerard is a virtuoso of language, which in her hands is precise, unlabored, and quietly wrought with emotion…. She is also a very diligent journalist…. Brave, keenly observational, and humanitarian… Gerard’s collection leaves an indelible impression.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Decidedly odd characters emerge in eight autobiographical essays. Combining journalism and memoir, Gerard, a novelist, essayist, and columnist for the online journal Hazlitt, brings a sharp eye to recollections of growing up on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Notable for sharply drawn portraits, her essays depict a host of unusual, eccentric men and women…. An intimate journey reveals a Florida few visitors would ever discover.”
— Kirkus
“Some essays… are strong, deeply researched journalism, distinguished by Gerard’s empathy for the subjects…. In [others], she deftly weaves together chapters from her family’s history with wider historical narratives…. In embracing a wide range of subject matter and styles, she creates not only a candid portrait of herself and her family, but unearths bigger truths about the lure and the hardships of life in Florida and the world.”
— David Warner, Creative Loafing
“Using the state as a means to write about themes like identity, intimacy, and family, Gerard weaves a beautifully complex book that tackles some of the country’s most urgent issues…. Though complex and intricate, her exceptional writing cuts with a surgeon’s care. Ultimately, this book facilitates a better understanding of ourselves through digging up the difficult truths we’d more likely attempt to hide away in the sand.”
— Christopher R. Alonso, Miami Rail
“Gerard’s memoiristic essays, compelling and confessional, are welcome breaks from the fascinating, densely researched narrative nonfiction that drives the majority of her book. Focusing on a single state, Gerard’s scope is nonetheless quite large, and her sensitive, sympathetic writer’s sensitivity for her subjects and interviewees is apparent.”
— Booklist
“These large-hearted, meticulous essays offer an uncanny x-ray of our national psyche, examining that American mess of saints and conmen, the peculiar, culpable innocence that confuses money and moral worth, charity and personal aggrandizement. Gerard’s prose is lacerating and compassionate at once, showing us both the grand beauty of our American dreams and the heartbreaking devastation they wreak.”
— Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State gloriously gutted me — and by that I mean changed me forever as a reader. Using Florida as a lens and the body as a ticket to travel, Gerard weaves her astonishing prose through land and corporeal truth, like the inside out of love and loss and violence and beauty. What if our obsessions and addictions and longings were actually knotted up in our guts with environmental destruction, religion, and some insane storyline called love? What if our bodies carry the trace evidence of all the places we’ve inhabited? What if our relationships were laid bare like a beach? Sunshine State reminds us of who we really are underneath the skin we live in and the ground we stand on — and mercifully, there is still beauty, in spite of everything.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water
“Good writers learn early in their careers that what people are most interested in is other people. In this regard, Sarah Gerard is indeed a very good writer. Her prose sparkles in this series of essays but it is the people in Sunshine State who capture and concern us. Vivid, sometimes disturbing, but always engaging, I loved this memoir of our southernmost state where an evolving people play, dance, struggle, and die beneath tropical skies.”
— Homer Hickam, author Carrying Albert Home and Rocket Boys
“With visceral wit and a literary toolkit full to the brim with new forms, Sarah Gerard’s first collection of essays makes the wild and untamed inner life of Florida bloom vividly within the reader’s mind. Sunshine State is a strange, thoughtful, and deeply felt journey through a state whose beauty and peril speak to the contradictions of an entire nation.”
— Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“I’ve never read anything like Sarah Gerard’s ‘Sunshine State’ and I’m worse off as a writer for it. Gerard manages to personalize the political and politicize the personal in ways that feel at once effortless and insanely ambitious. These essays remind me that at the bottom and top of structural inequities are people with emotions, friends, failures and memories of love and loss. ‘Sunshine State’ is a book of essays but really it defies and embraces form. That formal defiance leads to the some of the best essays I’ve read in the twenty-first century. ‘Sunshine State’ should be mandatory reading for everyone living in Florida, the United States and the world. It’s an amazing creation.”
— Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
“Sarah Gerard writes with soulful clarity and keen intelligence about the cultish relationships and aspirational thinking that course through American life. This is a collection packed with bittersweet longing — for a life that’s fuller or wilder or wealthier, for a larger self that’s always out of reach.”
— Alex Mar, author of Witches of America
“Sarah Gerard’s sparkling essays-as-memoir is as multifaceted as Florida itself. Navigating intense friendships, her family’s unconventional faith, a flirtation with Amway, tattoos, drugs, boyfriends and a husband, a homeless shelter and a bird sanctuary run by a corrupt madman, Gerhard is wide-eyed yet fully present, blunt yet empathetic to not only the crazy swirl of characters that surround her, but to herself in formation. A tough, honest, beautiful work by one of our brightest and most unflinching young writers.”
— Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House and author of All Tomorrow’s Parties
“As a fellow Floridian, it was a great gift to discover such a viscerally refreshing vision of home in Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State. Gerard masterfully explores the environmental, economic, and regional complexities of Florida alongside the eternal mysteries of identity, home, family, trauma, and desire. A stellar essay collection by a writer in possession of a talent as singular and furious as Florida itself.”
— Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“For those who fear Florida is comprised primarily of gators and the insane, this book may seem like it was written for you. In many ways, it surely was, giving life and voice to a world which has previously not held much acreage in your mind. But at its core, Sunshine State is a love letter to the wild and fascinating land itself, and the cast of characters who call it home.”
— Amelia Gray, author of Isadora and Gutshot
“In Sunshine State, Gerard goes deep into the paradoxes of her birth state. I found these essays to be smart, kind and illuminating. This book left me improved spiritually.”
— Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair and Suicide Blonde
“Intensely personal and intricately researched, Sarah Gerard’s essays break ground with the work of Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion. Gerard is provocative and an excellent sleuth. She digs for the secret, unshakeable truths we are busy turning away from—yet she is never sensational, never sentimental. Her mind is tough but she reaches with love. She asks that we reach with her—with her resilience, her prodigious strength. This book is a gift to all of us.”
— Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like and Bird
“Sarah Gerard has that lingering gaze shared by investigative journalists and lovers. With equal measures of scrutiny and tenderness, she examines her feverish homeland and its denizens, herself and those she loves. No idealization can withstand this kind of scrutiny, and thank God, because I would not trade the hours I’ve spent in Gerard’s world for any more perfect version. One can’t hope for a more sharp-eyed, tender-hearted chronicler of herself and our busted world.”
— Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State weaves narrative nonfiction and personal essay in a way that creates its own unique tapestry. This essay collection is unlike any other I’ve encountered—stylistically dazzling without sacrificing a reporter’s precision, relentlessly moving without doling a sentimentalist’s artificial sugar, this is a collection of so many Floridas only a native could know. At a time when America feels so broken, Gerard allowed me to love it again somehow.”
— Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick and The Last Illusion
“Brilliant, empathetic, fearless, and humane — in her search to better understand herself, her family, and the state that helped shape her, Sarah’s insight, heart, and diligence are boundless. The best book of essays I’ve read in years — a brilliant collection from a writer of incredible versatility and talent.”
— J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State is a deeply intelligent, personal, and political collection of rich essays, with a clarity sharp as an icicle and “place” as the connective tissue. The themes of class, identity politics, and loneliness emerge in ways that are simultaneously disturbing and comforting. The perfect book for the complex and heady humans in your life, AKA, for everyone.”
— Chloë Caldwell, author of Women and I’ll Tell You in Person
“In Sarah Gerard’s remarkable collection of essays, she explores a variety of oddball characters, and in the process, takes a probing look at the nature of Florida…. The characters Gerard spends time with in these autobiographical essays jump from the page and appear larger than life. Taking us into a Florida that we aren’t likely to see as tourists, Gerard’s essays are eye-opening and fascinating.”
— Read It Forward
“Armed with a mesmerizing breadth of empathy and a rare, hi-res emotional intuition, Sarah Gerard’s essays lead us forward through decades of her observation of our world, along the way unpacking everything from religion to economics, desire to aspiration, grief to the very grit of what seems to make a person tick. It’s rare to find a voice you can come to believe in so quickly and completely, like an old friend’s, and one whose very spirit makes the world seem that much more bearable, more true. Here is something to believe in.”
— Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State probes at the fringes of society, the intersection of right and wrong, the private core of our fundamental self-definitions. Sarah’s compassionate and boundlessly curious essay collection drives always toward truth, even when that truth is hard to bear. An unforgettable book, by a writer with a powerful, essential American voice.”
— Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“Compelling, intriguing, and brimming with voice, ‘Sunshine State’ showcases Sarah Gerard’s huge heart and huge brain. Each of her essays is a relentless interrogation — of herself and of the world around her. She is a seeker and a seer, a critic and an empath, an intellectual and a poet. This book isn’t just about Florida; it’s about America. It’s about humanity. I could read Sarah Gerard all day.”
— Diana Spechler, author of Who by Fire and Skinny
“Sarah Gerard brings an immersion journalist’s acuity and shrewdness to essays made urgent by a native daughter’s alloy of sympathy and rage. Capacious and captivating, Sunshine State gets Florida right—and dead to rights—while breathing fresh life into the shoe-leather memoir.”
— Justin Taylor, author of Flings
“Sarah Gerard’s writing is so precise, so deft, so marvelously human, so deeply connected to the people around her, that if I were to have my choice of executioners, I’d call on her.”
— John Reed, author of Snowball’s Chance
“Sarah Gerard is a writer who is willing to examine her own discomfort. In her devastatingly clear, self-possessed memoir in essays, Sunshine State, Gerard provides a balance of the public and the personal. The author examines her parents’ encounters with the pyramid-scheme Amway; the origins of Unity Church, an offshoot of the [Christian Science] movement; and the creation and fall of Florida’s Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary. Gerard also maps her own emotional landscape, detailing her mother’s career as an advocate for victims of sexual assault; Gerard’s own coming-of-age in Florida; and the deterioration of one of Gerard’s own young best-friendships. Sunshine State is all about coming to terms with the places and people that form us, acknowledging their every detail. In reading these poignant essays, I found myself turning inward to examine myself as Gerard turned inward—and as she turned outward to examine Florida and its people, I found myself turning outward as well. “It’s important to remember that uncomfortable feelings can’t actually hurt us,” writes Sarah Gerard. In Sunshine State, Gerard’s clarity has contributed to the creation of her exquisite book.”
— Julia Paganelli Marín, Arkansas International