Never Ready
A NOVEL
coming June 20
never ready is set in a beautiful, terrible time and place
downtown New York in the 90’s
“Mythic and modern, Never Ready is a wonderfully choreographed coming-of-age story evoking a time and place while capturing the universality of friendship and the life-saving bonds that lie somewhere in between.
This is a novel that is as smart and funny as it is tender and moving.”
Author of The Sun in Your Eyes, The Summer Demands, and Consolation
what’s the story?
Never Ready is a New York coming of age
Precocious Henrietta Drake knows it’s weird if your mother is your best friend. When her mom decamps for a Swiss psychiatric hospital, things really unravel.
Henri isn’t thrilled about a senior year with only her architecturally obsessed dad and is shocked when he suggests she drop out and head for the West Village.
The only catch is she has to live with a half sister she barely knows and work for a dance company she’s never heard of.
As the orbit of design and dance around American Genius Mark Carpenter collides with an epidemic, it reveals the tough, tender secrets of dysfunctional art families. Now Henri must confront their contradictions and fragility, not to mention her own.
Never Ready features an anxious heroine curating her own life. Art helps her hang on, but is she ready for more goodbyes?
who’s the writer?
My name is Lucie André
I grew up loving stories and watching too much TV. After finishing a degree in English, I went to New York where I learned you could eke out a living connecting generous artists with generous patrons.
This taught me just how much I like hanging around with big thinkers -
especially the ones who sing, dance, paint, and draw.
I liked what they did, but even more, I liked hearing their stories.
When I was in my late twenties, I worked for a remarkable dance company where two of the nine male dancers died of AIDS. For years I waited for someone else to write about this beautiful terrible time, when we were all growing into ourselves despite the suffering.
Post-pandemic, here in Baltimore, I was finally “ready.”