Binary Star — Sarah Gerard

"The particular genius of Binary Star is that out of such grim material it constructs beauty. It's like a novel-shaped poem about addiction, codependence and the relentlessness of the everyday, a kind of elegy of emptiness."
-- New York Times Book Review

"Rhythmic, hallucinatory, yet vivid as crystal. Gerard has channeled her trials and tribulations into a work of heightened reality, one that sings to the lonely gravity of the human body."
-- NPR

"Sarah Gerard's debut, Binary Star, radiates beauty. Gerard captures the beauty and scientific irony of damaged relationships and ephemeral heavenly lights. Just as with the stars, it is collapse that offers the most illumination."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Sarah Gerard's star is rising."
-- The Millions

"With the grace of a poem and the attitude of a punk anthem, Binary Star is an unusual treasure. Sarah Gerard is a young writer on the rise. She has a voice you have to hear to believe."
-- Bustle

"Gerard has produced a powerful, poetic, and widely relatable novel that eludes easy classification."
-- Publishers Weekly, Starred

"Gerard writes fiction like poetry, constructing a mesmerizing, complex story of addiction, obsession and love."
-- Time Out New York

"A glittering novel that tears into the headspace of a young anorexic in love with an alcoholic. Gerard's spare language and spacing is an intimate, cinematic poem."
-- The Brooklyn Rail

"Gerard has an interesting fearlessness."
-- VICE

"A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way."
-- Jenny Offill

"I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard's brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy,devastated, loving all of it."
-- Kate Zambreno

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.

With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction.

Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success.

Sarah Gerard's work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine's "The Cut," Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother and a graduate of The New School's MFA program for fiction.