Eight years apart, half-sisters Ingrid and Kate suffer the loss of their shared father when Ingrid is twenty and Kate only twelve. As they negotiate their uncertain sisterhood, Ingrid struggles with her artistic identity and love life while the hairline cracks expand in Kate’s seemingly perfect life. Told from multiple perspectives, I Know You Love Me, Too follows Ingrid and Kate as they investigate the mysteries left by their father and the riddles posed by their own lives. As Ingrid muses in “Friday Harbor,” the relationship between half-sisters should be half as complicated… but it’s not.
Praise for I Know You Love Me, Too
“I loved and admired the novel-in-stories I Know You Love Me, Too. Neswald’s talent, intelligence, and compassion are evident on every page. Her prose is fresh and always in service of the characters and their stories. Above all, I loved watching Kate and Ingrid—sisters with different needs for family, for love, and for connection—negotiate their mutual need for each other. I thought sometimes of Elizabeth Strout’s work while I read, but even more of Laurie Colwin’s linked collection Happy All the Time, another beautifully written book about the desperate importance of every moment of plain old ordinary life and love.”
— JUDITH CLAIRE MITCHELL
author of A Reunion of Ghosts and The Last Day of the War
“In I Know You Love Me, Too Amy Neswald weaves a rich tapestry of places and people, old times and new, from the ramble of Central Park to the Rain Forests of Peru. In these pages birds sing, and children grow, and marriages falter, and fat snakes lurk in trees. Life’s an adventure, harrowing even in the daily, and so many ways to turn the gem: Ingrid lives, and Ingrid dies. You have an aunt, and then you don’t. There is poetry in these sentences, and joy in these voices. I didn’t want to turn the last page, but the last page turned me: I Know You Love Me, Too is a trip both inward and out.”
— BILL ROORBACH
author of Lucky Turtle, Life Among Giants and The Remedy For Love
“The fourteen stories in Amy Neswald’s I Know You Love Me, Too twist around one another beguilingly, equal parts trauma, heartache, and true love. In stories that range from 9/11 New York, to a spiritual healing trip in the Amazon, to a whale-watching trip in Iceland, images flicker like fireworks. At the heart of this novel-in-stories is the relationship between two sisters. Kate and Ingrid enact old battles for the love of their father, dead long ago. Characters are scarred and beautiful, loving too much or not enough; as one of them says, ‘Love is like that; it’s hard to get the measurements just right.’ In this promising debut collection, Neswald gets the measurements just right. The stories are chain letters promising not fortune, but love. Pass them on.”
— PATRICIA O’DONNELL
author of Vigilance of Stars
“Amy Neswald’s stories are the creations of a storytelling Hippocrates: these are the very, very rare sort of super-artful fictions that reveal…and also heal. Vulnerability, pain, beauty that makes you cry—the author doesn’t merely hypnotize, she shows us the way Home. A magnificent debut.”
— TOM PAINE
author of Scar Vegas and A Boy’s Book of Nervous Breakdowns
“Amy Neswald writes with ferocious honesty about the bonds between us and the secrets we all keep. I love a book that delivers sentence by sentence, story by story, and I Know You Love Me, Too is that kind of collection. It transports with lushness and brilliance.”
— LEWIS ROBINSON
author of Water Dogs
“Amy Neswald’s story collection seem to be more than a novel. It is a full-fledged portrait, told in miniature and broad strokes, and somehow simultaneously. She’s not only created indelible characters, it feels as though she’s created a new form. As a writer, especially when working through, in and around the bedlam of the past year, I drew real purpose from Amy’s characters as they ‘revive their paints,’ as Tom Stoppard once wrote. The spiritual connection I feel with Amy’s characters has revived my paints. And that’s a feeling I heartily recommend.”
— RICK ELICE
Tony Award-winning playwright of Jersey Boys
