Margot Sullivan
The Year of Letting Go
by Margot Sullivan
A woman walks out of her marriage on a Tuesday in March with no plan and one suitcase. The novel follows the twelve months after — the sublet in Astoria, the job she takes at a garden center because it was hiring, the fr…
The Library
Dispatches
On finishing a draft and not knowing if it works
I sent the manuscript to my editor last Thursday. I've been useless since. This is the part nobody tells you about. You spend a year or two …
Books that changed how I write
People always ask who my influences are, and I never know how to answer without sounding like I'm performing good taste. So here's the hones…
Why I left publishing to write
I edited other people's books for twelve years. Good books, mostly. Some great ones. And the whole time, I had this low-grade guilt about th…
The Author
I spent twelve years as a book editor in New York before I admitted that the thing I actually wanted to do was write. That was 2016. I quit my job, moved to a rented farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, and wrote my first novel in six months of total panic.
Four books later, I'm still here. Still panicking, a little. I write about ordinary people making decisions they can't take back — the kind of choices that look small from the outside but rearrange everything. I've published with Knopf and Graywolf, and my short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Granta.
I live in Rhinebeck, New York, with my dog, Walter, and more houseplants than any reasonable person should own.