Entertainment Weekly: Making their adult fiction debut, Wibberley and Siegemund-Broka, a couple turned writing duo turned husband and wife, have crafted a book about two writing partners, Katrina Freeling and Nathan Van Huysen, who are themselves in denial about their romantic feelings for each other all while they write about other complicated couples. It’s a meta mind-trip that sets the stage (or the page, rather) for a meditation on writing, the power of prose, and the terrible cost of fear. Few books this year understood so deeply the thrall of books, and the freedom of only revealing one’s truest self in the pages of fiction. The Roughest Draft is an angsty tale of two emotionally blocked writers figuring out how to be honest with each other, but it’s also an ode to the ways in which stories can expose our vulnerabilities if we let them.
Dec 142022