Bitter Texas Honey — Ashley Whitaker

The Royal Tenenbaums meets Fleabag in this hilarious and dizzyingly smart debut about an over-the-top evangelical Texan family -- and the daughter at its center racing to finish her very important novel before her ex-boyfriend finishes his.
 
It's 2011, and twenty-three-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, God-loving family. Sure, she listens to conservative talk radio on her way to and from her internship at the Capitol. But she was once an America-hating leftist who kissed girls at parties, refused to shave, and had plenty of emotionless sex with jazz school friends -- that is until a drug-induced mania forced her to return to her senses.  
     But above all Joan is a writer, an artist, or at least she desperately wants to be. Always in search of inspiration for her novel, she catalogs every detail of her relationships with men -- including with her former muse slash current arch nemesis Roberto -- and mines her very dysfunctional family for material. But when her beloved, credit card debtâ€"racked cousin Wyatt finds himself in crisis, Joan's worldview is cracked open and everything comes crashing down.  
     Funny, whip-smart, and often tender, Bitter Texas Honey introduces us to the unforgettable and indefatigable Joan West: ambitious, full of contradictions, utterly herself. As she wades through it all -- addiction, politics, loss, and, notably, her father's string of increasingly bizarre girlfriends -- we witness her confront what it means to be a person, and an artist, in the world.