We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

I read this book back in December and, by the time I’m writing this in full, it’s March and I’ve read most of Cat Sebastian’s entire back catalogue. And I keep coming back to this book, debating a reread less than four months after I read it.

In December, I had a random desire to read Christmas novellas. One of the novellas (Hither, Page) I found was by Cat Sebastian, a name that I recognized generally from being a person who reads a lot of queer books generally. It was historical fiction, and I generally considered myself to not enjoy historical fiction, but I read it anyway as most of the Christmas novellas I was finding weren’t contemporary anyway. 

I enjoyed that novellas so much that I requested what I knew to be Cat Sebastian’s more recent and acclaimed book, We Could Be So Good from the library. I actually listened to the audiobook of this, and didn’t like the narrator, but I enjoyed the narrative itself so much that I finished it in two days, obsessively listening to it while I was doing other things and ignoring everyone in my household for the 16 hours that it took to finish this book.

It’s kind of hard to talk about the plot of this book because it’s very character focused. We follow Nick, a journalist, and Andy, the son of the publisher, as they get off on the wrong foot and then become fast friends while Nick teaches Andy how to be a journalist. When Andy is dumped by his fiancee and their mutual friend, Emily, he moves in with Nick and the bulk of the book is actually a roommates-to-lovers romance of two people trying to understand each other and loving the pieces they learn about each other. It’s very tender and sweet without shying away from the darker elements of queer life in the late 1950s. 

“If I have to choose between work and you, between a story and you, between anything and you, I’m picking you.”