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Available for Pre-Order The Distractions: a novel 
Coming Jan 14th, 2025

A tale of how technology enables obsession, envy, and unrelenting comparison, told through an eccentric cast of interconnected characters, The Distractions invites us to reflect on who we are watching, and why.

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“Liza Monroy is a great date —
a  masterful storyteller, witty, urbane, tender, and hilarious.”

— Dan White, author of  Under The Stars and The Cactus Eaters

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Liza Monroy is the author of The Distractions and three previous books. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, O (Oprah Magazine), Poets & Writers, Marie Claire, Longreads, Newsweek, Guernica, Catamaran, Jane, Self, Psychology Today, Jezebel, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers, Bust and many other publications and anthologies, including both editions of The New York Times’ Best of Modern Love, Best American Food Writing 2021, Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, Oprah’s Little Book of Calm and Comfort, One Big Happy Family, and Wedding Cake For Breakfast. Her latest clips and portfolio highlights can also be found here.

Reviews

“An all-around expert on romantic love, Liza Monroy delivers these lively, touching essays about love in the depersonalized time of tech. Spanning countries and dates – some more successful than others and all under the watchful eye of her mother, a profiler for the U.S. State Department – Monroy delivers an engaging chronicle for our times.”   

San Jose Mercury News

“…it is interesting to watch Monroy learn her lessons, to stop romanticizing her partners or assigning them to neat boxes, to assert boundaries and rules, even if they get broken. When she finally gets her happy ending, it feels earned.”   

Publishers Weekly

“Liza Monroy has a magical voice, the kind that makes you want to read the next sentence and then the one after that to see what turn her writing will take next. She is observant, funny, and curiously wise about the culture we live and flounder in.” 

Daphne Merkin,

writer and critic
for The New Yorker, essayist
and novelist

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  Surf inside my mind  

“Liza Monroy knows writing…and nose-riding.”
-Marisol Godínez / Sol Y Mar Surfboards

Books

Liza Monroy's Latest Releases

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Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire

Shoes chronicles misadventures in the search for love, bound together under the watchful eye of my eccentric, single mother, a “profiler” for the U.S. State Department who claims to discern someone’s true nature simply by looking on Facebook. She uses her professional aptitude to try to weed out the “wrong” men in my life. But things take a strange turn in response to a piece of feedback I received about the article. 
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Mexican High

In a setting rife with sex, drugs, and political corruption, Monroy’s first novel (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) is also a revealing look at elite Mexican society and its freedoms, dangers, and excesses. Monroy’s debut, Elle magazine writes, “marvelously captures modern Mexico City.” MORE

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The Marriage Act

A timely and topical look at the changing face of marriage in America, The Marriage Act (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2014) speaks to the emergent generation forming bonds outside of tradition—and sometimes even outside the law. With this memoir, “Liza Monroy emerges as both an artist and a hero,” ... 

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SHOP:

BOOKSHOP SANTA CRUZ

INDIEBOUND

POWELLS

BARNES AND NOBLE

AMAZON

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