Book Launch: Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover by Mila Jaroniec in conversation with Chloe Caldwell

Split Lip Press is excited to announce the forthcoming publication of Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover, the debut novel by Mila Jaroniec. A stunning new voice, Jaroniec brings echoes of Michelle Tea and Hunter S. Thompson while delivering a work of astonishing precision and subtlety.

With razor-sharp imagery, the fractured story of our narrator comes to life: A young woman at an emotional crossroads embarking on a journey to her future. Or is she falling into her past?

Through flashbacks, photographs, confessions and letters, we discover our narrator – as sex store worker, suicide survivor, isolated lover, immigrant’s daughter, deliberate alcoholic and artistic failure. She cycles through images, obsessions and memories, as she tries to glue together the unhinged parts of herself, both in the physical world and the one in her mind. She recalls Sloan, the girlfriend-who-got-away; Mischa, her heartbroken best friend and co-conspirator; and her elusive older brother, whose absence continues to shape her life.

Acclaimed author Darcey Steinke notes that Mila writes with “a seer’s vision and a poet’s touch.” Gaby Dunn, creator of the YouTube series Just Between Us, says “Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover is about being young and stupid and also too smart for your own good. It’s about the undying friendship between queer women…above all, it’s about living through this, as Courtney Love would say.”

Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover is a road novel with no road, a coming of age story that arrives at its beginning. What starts as a journey to reclaim a lost love ultimately becomes an examination of a different sort of loss, of something intangible whose weight is still felt, the effects of which are deep-seated and ineffable.