Praise for I Meant It Once
“Quietly devastating…Doyle’s stories trick you into thinking they are light and cavalier but leave you with a sense of having read some profound truths about yourself and the world you live in…Doyle is an unmistakably individual and exciting new voice.”
—Irish Times
“[A] lively debut… Doyle’s prose reads like Lydia Davis at her most arch and pensive.”
—Washington Post
“Doyle's characters are brightly imagined and, at moments, darkly humorous. She captures womanhood's intense and precarious state of deciding whose expectations to rise to and whose to break away from. I Meant It Once is brilliantly conceived, written, and compiled.”
—Shelf Awareness
"Kate Doyle's sentences are something to be savored, and the characters in these stories live and breathe and stand up fully from the page. Perceptive, funny, forthright, and often alarmingly relatable."
—Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
“I Meant it Once signals the arrival of a major talent and voice. These stories are by turns funny, melancholy, wry, and piercing in their insight. More than that, I arrived at the end of each of these stories feeling a little less lonely in a world that seemed a little less dark. Kate Doyle brings a rare confidence to stories about the lonely, the prickly, the aimless, and the out-of-sorts, all told in prose that is lively and beautiful. I loved these stories.”
—Brandon Taylor, author of Booker Prize Finalist Real Life and Story Prize Winner Filthy Animals
"Crystalline, funny, and richly alive, the stories in I Meant It Once thrilled me with their emotional acuity, their delicately nuanced portrayals of desire and intimacy, and their formal and syntactical dexterity and play."
—Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want and Flight
"With I Meant It Once, Kate Doyle proves to be an exciting, fresh, intelligent, unique, poetic and wild new talent. More, the stories feel like dispatches from the front of modernity. This is what it feels like to be here, and young, right now. This is a timely, inspired, great book."
—Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
"Kate Doyle’s economical and beautiful prose is suffused with a wistful melancholy shot through with wry humor, and we feel her characters’ longing as though it is our own. The details are exact, as are the insights; the stories feel utterly real. The result is intimate and propulsive. An exceptional debut.”
—Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
"Kate Doyle’s gorgeous, electric fiction upends expectations about how stories are told and what exactly needs telling. Lovers and rivals, siblings and friends navigate the funny, strange, sometimes explosive, sometimes transcendently beautiful terrain of love and ambition. These are wise, intimate, essential stories."
—Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean House
"The crystalline stories of I Meant It Once capture the complexities of our most intimate relationships—between partners, friends, family, and with one's self. Kate Doyle is a gifted storyteller, with a highly attuned sense for both language and vulnerability. This collection brims with the aches and longings, those wrenching pangs of emotional resonance, that one searches for in great fiction."
—Alexandra Chang, author of Days of Distraction and Tombsweeping
“In this incredible collection, with inventive and beautiful language, Doyle captures the stories of young women who find themselves so close to transformation into a defined version of themselves, one that will lead to a future that will hold them, and she does so with honesty and verve.”
—Kevin Wilson, bestselling author of Now is Not the Time to Panic and Nothing to See Here
"A delicate balance of sharp and sweet, I Meant It Once explores longing, belonging, and the big emotions that can make us feel small, with unusual elegance and depth. Kate Doyle is both a gifted observer of human nature and an original and poetic prose stylist."
—Coco Mellors, bestselling author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein
“Gorgeously written and staggeringly honest, I Meant It Once is a reclamation of female friendship, intellect, rage, desire, and creativity—placing a timeless filter on contemporary questions. It will bewitch you."
—Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of The Rabbit Hutch
“Fleet, funny, and perceptive, I Meant It Once entertains even as it contemplates what people actually mean to each other, and what it all means.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Readers will savor Doyle’s bracing blend of wit and candor.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“A quiet but revelatory debut collection.”
—LitReactor
“I was enraptured by these stories… Doyle forces us to question why we dismiss young women of this age so readily and at what cost. A brilliant new voice and a subtle inquirer of society. Perfect for fans of Greta Gerwig.”
—The Gloss Magazine
“With wry wit and meticulous precision, Doyle immerses us in the bittersweet aching of that last sliver of young adulthood.”
—Another Chicago Magazine
“The characters in this collection navigate the world of early adulthood with honesty and wit…With humor and sharp prose, Doyle explores the dynamics at play in these transformative years.”
—Electric Literature
“Each of the whip-smart short stories in Kate Doyle’s debut collection leans into the strangeness of young adult life.”
—PureWow
“Breathtaking glimpses into the lives of twenty-somethings.”
—Largehearted Boy
“Doyle captures the vicissitudes of young women’s relationships with themselves, their siblings, their friends and lovers… With a spare, soft touch, she celebrates the intimacies and mourns the losses that shape her characters’ lives."
—Observer
“Clever and mesmerizing…Each story is a stand-out. To quote Sum-41, it’s all killer and no filler.”
—Debutiful
