How To Live

It's really a book where the tissue between life and death feels very thin at times and Kelle Groom negotiates these mortal stations like a wandering medieval saint on residencies and short term teaching jobs who finds consolation, wisdom and suicidal despair in "violet rain", flashes of feeling in the grasp of a hand, while the euphoria of love and eloquent scraps of knowledge keenly ornament this trail where being "a bare faced reader" is precisely enough. Kelle Groom writes with a relentless and avid consciousness and in this story there is a child and I think it her own becoming.

-Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls and Afterglow



Kelle Groom is a navigator of the soul's voyage, from mooring to mooring, no matter the tumultuous seas.  She is a writer of deepest heart and purest eye, who seizes you and takes you where she wanders. How to Live is one of the most beautiful books I know, a profound reckoning.

-Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships



At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be- a way to live- after a series of devastating events. But there's nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book.

-Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain