Trade paperback, 234 pages. ISBN: 9781943679157.
The Formation of Calcium
By M. S. Coe
Middle-aged Mary Ellen Washie has finally freed herself of her stultified past life in western New York state and moved to Florida. With the husband she’s grown to hate firmly in her rearview mirror, and all ties to her family cut off, she changes her name, bleaches her hair, and befriends Natalie, a seemingly kind, martini-loving woman whom she promptly begins to manipulate. As her machinations propel her beyond the brink of who she used to be, Mary Ellen seeks to unburden herself—but not one to sit down with pen and paper, she narrates the events of her new life into a cassette tape recorder, giving each tape an innocuous name to keep the curious away. A riveting account of one woman’s awful reinvention, M. S. Coe’s new novel is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected. With elements of pulp noir and confessional literature, The Formation of Calcium depicts the bland misery of modern American life as one woman seeks her own ill-fated transformation.
Born in Las Vegas, Nevada, M. S. Coe is an American writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. After she graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, Clash Books published her first novel, New Veronia, in 2019. Coe’s stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Nashville Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has held residencies from the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Petrified Forest National Park, and Ora Lerman Trust.
“The more Mary Ellen tries to reinvent herself, the more lies she tells and the more risks she’s forced to take, and her recordings veer from understandable desperation to myopic self-assuredness, making for a vibrant character study (‘It’s like exhilaration and anticipation colliding down in your stomach, where everything real is felt,’ she says about her gambits). It’s a wild, rewarding ride.”
“The Formation of Calcium is a dark comedy, a horror story, and the sad tale of a marginalized woman.”
“Ghosts are never silent in this novel, which indulges us in the fantasy of how we might ghost ourselves if we had to outrun our misdeeds. In an age of podcasts and data trails and even analog confessions, our stories follow us around no matter what we do to try to change them. After all, as our narrator tells us, ‘only things that are real can be counterfeited.’”
REVIEWS AND FEATURES
Publishers Weekly (spoiler alert!) / Electric Literature
Karen Mulvahill, Foreword Reviews (spoiler alert!)
Carl Fuerst, Necessary Fiction (spoiler alert!)
Books of the Month, Vol. 1 Brooklyn / Excerpt, CommuterLit / Excerpt