We’re excited about next week’s Substack Live interview on Tuesday, March 24 at 7 p.m. ET with , author of our March 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick, memoir sorry i keep crying during sex, published by Abrams Books. Bring your questions for Jesse and we’ll try to get to them all! In the meantime, join our subscriber chat to share your thoughts about this memoir, whether you’ve already read it or will be soon.

You can also hear Jesse on our relationships panel in New York on May 2 at our personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live (and if you can’t make it in person, we’ll be recording all our panels for later audio release), pending speaker approval.

You can read an excerpt of the book here:

Find out more and grab your copy at one of the links below, and/or request it from your local library.

Where to buy sorry i keep crying during sex:

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About sorry i keep crying during sex:

A powerful, provocative, and genre-bending literary memoir that grapples with victimhood, recovery, and resilience

In the before, Jesse James Rose is happy. She has a beautiful boyfriend with melty glacier eyes, she’s on a euphoric journey of gender exploration, and New York City is perfect.

In the after, she’s single, making dinner for her grandfather, and wondering if he’s going to forget her name today. Except, in the before, her first-grade music teacher led her into a dark room to show her something he shouldn’t have. And in the after, she’s finding healing and comfort in coming into her own, even as her grandfather declines.

In the before, she was fine, more or less. But in the after, she has to reckon with whatever the hell restorative justice really, truly means.

Following the aftermath of an assault, and the heartache of caring for a grandfather with Alzheimer’s, sorry i keep crying during sex tells a captivating story of identity, recovery, grief, survivorship, and transness. Through lists, theatrical scripts, flashbacks, and Grindr DMs, Jesse James Rose’s genre-defying memoir is raw and hysterically funny, and takes readers on the wild ride of overcoming the struggles of a trans twentysomething.

What people are saying about sorry i keep crying during sex:

“As a trans gen-z cusp, this book hit good and hard for me. sorry I keep crying during sex is a masterclass in vulnerability. Jesse answers our questions before we can even ask, and they take the reader places most authors wouldn’t venture to.”
—Dylan Mulvaney, New York Times bestselling author of Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer

“Jesse’s memoir is unlike anything you’ve ever read—a feat of experimental writing. It’s hilarious, heartbreaking, beautiful, and raw (in more ways than one).”
—Zachary Zane, author of Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto

About Jesse James Rose:

Jesse James Rose (she/they) is a transgender actor, writer, and content creator based in New York City. Every president who has attacked her in the media has been shot at. Rose holds degrees from NYU in music theatre and child psychology, as well as a certificate in diversity, equity, and inclusion from Cornell University. As an actress, Jesse has starred in productions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cabaret, The Fantasticks, and won Best Actor at the Berlin Indie Film festival for the short film “Barstool.” In 2025 she became the first openly transgender woman elected to the national council of the Actors Equity Union, specializing in policymaking that combats harassment and hostile work environments. Jesse’s work lives largely on social media, where she writes (& yaps) about gender, queerness, survivorship, mental health, her feelings, and her exes on Instagram & TikTok (@jamesissmiling).

Also check out Jesse James Rose’s original essay about the power of sex education online via talking about their sex life:

Questions about the Open Secrets Book Club? Reply if you’re receiving this via email, or contact opensecretsmag at gmail dot com

For a little over an hour, Veena and Open Secrets Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel discussed how she went from a depressed teenage college student to a married Mormon mother of three, the a-ha moment when she realized she was in a cult, how she escaped cult life, the insidious nature of her cult leader’s mind control efforts, how to spot cult-like red flags, how she found her editor and publisher for her debut memoir, other titles that were considered and why she fought for her subtitle, what her “fugue state” writing process was like, what she’s working on next, and so much more.

Follow Veena on Instagram and learn more about her at veenadinavahi.com

Read an excerpt from The True Happiness Company here.

Want to discuss the book, cults, and related topics? Join our book club chat discussion.

Our March 2026 Open Secrets Book Club selection is memoir sorry i keep crying during sex by Jesse James Rose; we’ll interview Jesse James Rose on March 24 at 7 pm ET. Keep up with all of our virtual and in-person events on our about page.

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Our next Open Secrets Book Club pick for January 2026 is memoir The True Happiness Company: How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That by Veena Dinavahi. You can read an excerpt below:

We’ve been experimenting with the best way to host our discussions, and for now, we are going to host the reader-focused part of our book club discussions in Substack chats, with this one starting today, January 8, 2026. Subscribers will receive an email when the chat starts.

You don’t have to have read the entire book to participate. Going forward, we will announce each new book club pick and chat schedule approximately two months prior. You can always check our about page to see which book club titles are coming up.

Then, for a personal perspective on writing inspiration, craft, and the story behind the story, after our subscriber chat has been going for a little while, we’ll host a live author Q&A in which our editor interviews the author, with room for audience questions too.

On Thursday, January 29, at 8:30 pm ET, check out our Substack Live interview with Veena and bring your questions! You can watch Substack Live interviews in the Substack app or on your desktop by clicking the link above. Subscribers will receive an email when the interview starts. We will post the full video interview soon afterward at the bottom of this post.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask Veena your own questions during the Q&A, and if you can’t make it live, you can leave those questions as comments in this post or in the chat and we will do our best to ask them.

An exclusive note from The True Happiness Company author Veena Dinavahi:

I never thought I’d one day say the words: I was in a self-help cult. When I first met its leader, Bob Lyon, I was a nineteen-year-old physics and philosophy double major who owned an autographed collection of Hillary Clinton campaign buttons. I’d swallowed the model minority myth hook, line, and sinker, so I thought that someone like me—a high-achieving daughter of Indian immigrants—was immune to coercive influence. And then my trajectory broke every trope I knew: I wound up a college dropout, Mormon convert, and married stay-at-home mom of three, asking: What just happened? And what will it mean to move forward?

This book is both my attempt to capture the disorientation I felt when faced with these questions and to unravel their complicated, messy answers. I take you along, in real time, as I fall under Bob’s influence, and then, as I slowly begin to extricate and reclaim my identity. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I would never fall for something like that,” I hope my story complicates that assumption, and that it inspires tenderness and compassion for those who wind up in cults or abusive relationships. This is my love letter to anyone seeking answers to life’s big questions and a tribute to the strange, unexpected places the journey can take us.

About memoir The True Happiness Company:

It is hard for Veena Dinavahi to live while her classmates keep dying. The high-achieving daughter of loving Indian immigrants, Veena lives in a typical white American suburb—except for its unusually high suicide rate. For years, she tries to manage her mental health in all the right ways, but nothing seems to work. Until, on a late-night Google search, Veena’s mom discovers Bob Lyon—a sixty-year-old white man in the backwoods of Georgia who claims he can make her want to live again. He calls himself “The True Happiness Company” and, as their relationship progresses, “Daddy.” Veena becomes increasingly enveloped in his strangely close-knit community, and before she knows it, she’s a college dropout, married mother of three, and Mormon convert who has gotten way too good at dismissing her gut feeling that something is wrong. But when Veena’s treatment goes too far, she slowly begins to question whether true happiness can even exist as an absolute.

In this revelatory debut, Veena traces the contours of her life to explore the question that plagued her in the years afterward: how did I fall for that? And what will it mean to move forward?

Told with unflinching clarity and shot through with incisive wit, The True Happiness Company is Veena Dinavahi’s singular exploration of what it means to lose and reclaim your identity, rethink mental illness, and learn to trust your intuition in a world determined to annihilate it.

About the author:

Veena Dinavahi is an Indian American writer who divides her time between Connecticut and New York. Her personal essays have appeared in The Rumpus and Pulp Magazine. She holds a degree in psychology from Columbia University and currently works in the fashion industry. The True Happiness Company is her first book.

Where to buy The True Happiness Company:

Below are buy links for print, ebook, and audiobook editions. You can also borrow or request at your local library or order it from your local independent bookstore. When you shop from these Bookshop Open Secrets Book Club links or our Bookshop storefront, we get a small percentage of each sale, which goes toward paying our writers.

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Audiobook narrated by Veena Dinavahi

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Other Open Secrets Book Club happenings

March 24, 7 p.m. ET: Interview with , author of sorry i keep crying during sex: a memoir

May 2026 (date/time TBD): Interview with , author of Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die

July 2026 (date/time TBD): Interview with , author of Adulting for Amateurs: Misdventures of a Geriatric Millennial

Note: We don’t accept pitches or submissions for our book club, but authors who subscribe to Open Secrets (and anyone else who subscribes) are welcome to submit to our latest call for personal essay submissions.

Questions about the Open Secrets Book Club? Reply if you’re receiving this via email, or contact opensecretsmag at gmail dot com

Our November 2025 Open Secrets Book Club pick is memoir in essays Alligator Tears by , who spoke on our identity panel at personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live in May. Start reading now and join us in a Substack chat starting Monday, November 10 to discuss the book.

Then on Monday, November 17 at 8:30 pm ET, check out our Substack Live interview with Edgar and bring your questions! You can watch Substack Live interviews in the Substack app or on your desktop by clicking the link above. Subscribers will be notified via email when the interview starts. We will post the full interview afterward.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask Edgar your own questions during the Q&A, and if you can’t make it live, you can leave those questions as comments in this post or in the chat and we will do our best to ask them.

About Alligator Tears:

In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life.

Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she’d be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn’t afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists’ smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other’s cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him.

Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.

A note from Edgar Gomez:

I’d known for a long time that I wanted to write a book about my experiences growing up poor in Florida—the good, the bad, the weird swamp sex and working at The Flip Flop Shop and living in a motel with my family and selling bootleg CDs at the flea market—but I wasn’t sure what the deeper message was until the pandemic hit.

I was living in Jackson Heights, Queens, in a neighborhood home to immigrants home from all over the world, and seeing how my undocumented neighbors were repeatedly failed by the government, forced to continue working without access to social benefits like food stamps and unemployment, reminded me of all the false promises this country is built on and that I used to believe in. That if you work hard and stay humble, you can “pull yourself by the bootstraps.” That the American dream is available to everyone. In the darkest days of the pandemic, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mom, who’d immigrated to the US from Nicaragua in the 80s, and how decades later she was still working the same job as a barista at the airport Starbucks, exposing herself to COVID-19 because she couldn’t afford to take time off.

Alligator Tears is a love letter to her and to all the people who held me up when I was too weak to stand on my own: the coworkers I spent holidays in the back room with, the friends I spent nights dancing with at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando on Noche Latina, and lowkey the entire cast of season 3 of America’s Next Top Model, especially Eva (this will make sense later). It’s a book about survival that I hope makes you laugh and feel a little less alone. Think of it as a rags-to-riches story, except I never get rich, but learn that you can still have a rich life full of love, purpose, and community. That’s the message.

You can check out excerpts from the book at Queerty and Electric Lit.

About the author:

Edgar Gomez is a queer NicaRican writer born and raised in Florida. Gomez’s first book, High-Risk Homosexual, won the American Book Award, a Stonewall Nonfiction Book Honor Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Alligator Tears: A Memoir-in-Essays, was released in February to critical acclaim. He lives between New York and Puerto Rico.

Here’s where to buy Alligator Tears, which you can also borrow or request at your local library or order it from your local independent bookstore. When you shop from these Bookshop links or our Bookshop storefront, we get a small percentage of each sale, which goes toward paying our writers.

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Amazon

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Other Book Club Happenings

ICYMI, check out our September book club pick, The Loneliness Files by and watch our interview with Athena here:

If you want to get a head start on next year’s reading, our January 2026 book club selection will be memoir The True Happiness Company: How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That by . The Q&A will be on Thursday, January 29 at 8:30 pm ET. Read an excerpt here:

Have any questions about the book club? Leave a comment or email us at opensecretsmag at gmail dot com! Please note that we don’t accept book club submissions from authors or publicists, but manually select among our contributors and event speakers.

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Want to add to the discussion about the book? Comment here or in our chat.

Watch the full interview above, and join us in November, when we’ll be reading and discussing memoir in essays Alligator Tears by , and interviewing Edgar on November 17 at 8:30 pm ET in the Substack app.

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Update: Watch our interview with Athena here:

Here’s how it works:

You read The Loneliness Files over the next few weeks. On Monday, September 22, we will launch a Substack chat, open to everyone, to start discussing the book. You may join if you’ve read part or all of the book, but know we will be discussing the book in its entirety. That chat will remain open so you can return to it later if you have further thoughts on the book or overall topic.

On Tuesday, September 30, at 8:30 pm ET, we will be hosting a Substack Live Q&A with Athena and Open Secrets Magazine Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel. Follow the link above to access it; subscribers will be notified when the Q&A starts. We will post the full interview afterward for anyone who couldn’t attend.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask Athena your own questions during the Q&A, time permitting, and if you can’t make it live, you can leave those questions as comments in this post or in the chat and we will try to ask them.

Here’s where to buy the book, which you can also borrow or request at your local library.

Print

Bookshop

Powell’s Books

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books-a-Million

Ebook

Bookshop

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Google Play

Audiobook

Libro.fm

Audible

About The Loneliness Files:

What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness.

Living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets and working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred fifty miles from her family and friends, Dixon begins watching mystery videos on YouTube, listening to true crime podcasts, and playing video game walk-throughs just to hear another human voice. She discovers the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died alone, her body remaining in front of a glowing television set for three years before the world finally noticed. Searching for connection, Dixon plumbs the depths of communal loneliness, asking essential questions of herself and all of us: How have her past decisions left her so alone? Are we, as humans, linked by a shared loneliness? How do we see the world and our place in it? And finally, how do we find our way back to each other?

Searing and searching, The Loneliness Files is a groundbreaking memoir in essays that ultimately brings us together in its piercing, revelatory examination of how and why it is that we break apart.

An excerpt from “Say You Will Remember Me” from The Loneliness Files:

I remember loneliness because it is pervasive. It has a way of wrapping itself around me until it hides what’s actually true. It squeezes tightly in my mind until what makes sense, what’s actually happened, is distorted. Sometimes the loneliness makes me forget the goodness and the connection of my life. I find ways to compartmentalize these experiences until it is easy to remember only what I want. I think alone is sexy. Mysterious in its heaviness. Alone seems like a choice. Loneliness doesn’t. This seems like I’ve been forgotten, passed over, discarded. It can feel like the world is way too bright—just an expanse of whiteness with nothing else in sight. It makes me feel singular and small.

On the cusp of 2021, in a green dress and red lipstick, I told myself I could cry. One wailing, sobbing mess of a breakdown between sips of liquor because when I woke up the next morning the world would appear to be new. This New Year’s Eve was only a celebration of a year that needed to end. A year that saw some of us sink into isolation and others delve further into individualism and selfishness. This night was a cap to months of loneliness. A small bit of joy and release before heading into the bleakness of what seemed to be the coming year.

I’d checked out of the news months ago—too overwhelmed by death and discord that I felt myself slipping too much into darkness. This cry was a promise to myself that it would wash away the concrete deaths and dying dreams of what 2020 could have been. I had a book on the way and I’d finally started to find my voice when I’d been so sure I’d lost it. As selfish as my feelings may have been, it just wasn’t fair and I wanted to wallow. I cried and then danced until my body slowed to rocking, and when the countdown ended the loneliness came in like a wave.

My loneliness is not groundbreaking, though. And it is not tragic. It just is. Nothing more and nothing less. I don’t expect it to be important to anyone other than myself, but I write about it anyway. I turn it over like something precious in my hands—carefully as it floats across my fingers so I can see the details of it. Where dust and dirt and grit hide—the things that irritate and choke me when I breathe too deeply.

My loneliness is deep. It’s oddly comforting because I know what to expect. It’s like a light switch—sudden and complete—when it rears its head. My body starts to wind down and my mind disengages. Loneliness and isolation have been a slow build of contentment over the years before the sudden revelation of how the two are really disconnect disguised as choice. How between parents, a sibling, family, and friends is always fear that I will die alone. That no one will remember me.

***

Sometime before Christmas in 2003, London was headed toward the new year when Joyce Carol Vincent died in front of the television. She wasn’t found until January 2006. I was 25. She was 38. A set of coveted ages right in the middle of all the world is made for. I can only imagine we were a marketer’s dream. When we think of the world, youth and beauty are at the center of it all. As time moves forward, the distance between importance and ourselves grows wider, though. But in the waning days of 2003, Joyce and I were insulated in my youth and her beauty—important if only for those reasons.

Joyce and I were an ocean apart, the bookends of Gen X. This generation of latchkey kids who knew how to survive alone. Years later, they’d call us the Forgotten Generation sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials and far removed from Gen Z. Joyce and I had hurtled past the start of the millennium and emerged into a world that was falling apart and coming together at the same time. War and terrorism and the heightening of the world’s fears made an odd mix in a cloud of cyber connection. The planet was continuously in contact, yet somehow it was splintering at the seams.

2003 saw the start of the National Do Not Call Registry—another way to control access and ensure the links between us were ones we actually desired. The website 4chan began its path, and wars between the RIAA and music downloaders took to court. Between our emails and chatrooms and endless news cycles we saw everything, but we continued drifting into a world that seemed to only care about age/sex/location.

I wonder about the growing pile of electronic connections Joyce missed. Perhaps there was an extended away message on AIM or an inbox piling upon itself with spam. Had she started a MySpace during its first wave only for it to be abandoned without warning? Present day, these social threads seem so commonplace, but now how long would it take for red flags to raise? How long would her usernames have to remain dormant before someone thought to make physical contact? Without the constant expectation of likes and responses, just how much longer could she have lingered away from the fray even without her death?

More details from Athena Dixon:

Joyce Carol Vincent died alone in 2003 and her body sat in front of a glowing television for three years before the world finally noticed. The Loneliness Files, a collection of essays exploring disconnect and loneliness in a hyperconnected world, ponders if each of us is destined to be Joyce—a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of the world, forgotten by the rest of the living. So many who grew up in Gen X and beyond understand living parallel lives both online and off. To sometimes be a version of yourself ghosting just beyond the surface of your flesh. And how sometimes the disconnection that comes from escapism makes it nearly impossible to come back to reality. And there are those who also understand that the physical form can actually be the trap—the true place you are not properly fastened to the world.

Nearly 25 years after Joyce’s death, in Spring 2020, the world as we knew it ground to a halt. Streets emptied, shelves were bare, and the world quieted to a hum. A couple of weeks at home while the world righted itself seemed a gift, a way to reset from busy lives and expectations. But, as weeks turned into months and then into years, what remained of the initial excitement were the bare bones of relationships strained by too much closeness and self-reflection. The world learned all of us are actually lonely. Or disconnected. Or isolated. Or some combination of the three. The Loneliness Files explores the fine line we walk between these emotions, balancing each with joy and love and grief and fear.

We hope you’ll join us, and if you can’t read the whole book before our discussion, you’re still welcome to participate.

Feel free to use the below questions to get you thinking about the topic. We’d love to see your answers in the comments:

What does loneliness mean to you?

When was the last time you felt lonely, and how did you handle it?

What’s the difference for you in being alone and being lonely?

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