Jardine Libaire
Jardine Libaire is the author of Here Kitty Kitty. She is a graduate of Skidmore College and a 1997 graduate of the University of Michigan Creative Writing MFA Program, where she won a Hopwood Award. Jardine won the Zoetrope Screenplay contest in 2012 for her script You’re An Animal and is currently adapting the screenplay into a short novel.
YOU’RE AN ANIMAL (August 2023)
A tender portrait of four misfits, on the run across Texas, that speaks to those who are left out, those who opt out—and to the wild animal in us all.
It’s springtime in Oklahoma, and Ernie, an outcast in a group of outcasts, feels uneasy. Nerves at the abandoned summer camp where he and his fellow oddballs are crashing have been on edge since the arrival of a teenager named Coral, unceremoniously dropped off from her family’s minivan one afternoon. Adding to her aura of mystery, Coral doesn’t say a word. Ever.
When a drug lab explosion burns the compound to the ground, Ernie, Coral, and the hard-living couple Staci and Ray escape on a pair of motorcycles. Feeling shaky with fear and alive with a new surge of freedom, the four outcasts find a rundown house in rural Texas: It's a place to stay, they tell themselves, for now. Yet to their surprise, over card games and wild strawberries and target-shooting and late-night dancing to ZZ Top on the local radio, a quirky little family forms. At the heart of their new home is Coral, whose silence only amplifies her strange, undefinable power and the sense that she found them for a reason.
But soon, tensions rise, and a mysterious threat begins to materialize—whether it’s coming from inside or outside the house still isn’t clear. All this crew knows is, now there’s something at stake: their chosen family, forged by both loneliness and joy, and bonded by an awkward kind of love.
“Libaire creates a delicious universe at a constant brink of collapse, a universe I never wanted to see end.”—Gerardo Sámano Córdova, author of Monstrilio
“You’re an Animal is a fast and perilous ride toward the center of what makes us human in the most desperate of circumstances . . . Roving and mysterious, this novel is hot to the touch.”—Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke
“Absolutely freaking breathtaking . . . This will be the best love story you read this year, trust me!”—Elin Hilderbrand, author of The Five-Star Weekend
THE SOBER LUSH (2020)
In a culture where sipping "rosé all day" is seen as the epitome of relaxation, "grabbing a drink" the only way to network; and meeting at a bar the quintessential "first date," many of us are left wondering if drinking alcohol really is the only way to cultivate joy and connection in life.
Jardine Libaire and Amanda Eyre Ward wanted to live spontaneous and luxurious lives, to escape the ordinary and enjoy the intoxicating. Their drinking, however, had started to numb them to the present moment instead of unlocking it. Ward was introduced to Libaire when she first got sober. As they became friends, the two women talked about how they yearned to create lives that were Technicolor, beautifully raw, connected, blissed out, and outside the lines . . . but how? In The Sober Lush, Libaire and Ward provide a road map for living a lush and sensual life without booze. This book offers ideas and instruction for such nonalcoholic joys as:
• The allure of "the Vanish," in which one disappears early from the party without saying goodbye to a soul, to amble home under the stars
• The art of creating zero-proof cocktails for all seasons
• Having a fantastic first date while completely sober
• A primer on setting up your own backyard beehive, and honey tastings
For anyone curious about lowering their alcohol consumption or quitting drinking altogether, or anyone established in sobriety who wants inspiration, this shimmering and sumptuous book will show you how to keep indulging in life even if you stop indulging in alcohol.
WHITE FUR (2017)
A stunning star-crossed love story set against the glitz and grit of 1980s New York City
When Elise Perez meets Jamey Hyde on a desolate winter afternoon, fate implodes, and neither of their lives will ever be the same. Although they are next-door neighbors in New Haven, they come from different worlds. Elise grew up in a housing project without a father and didn’t graduate from high school; Jamey is a junior at Yale, heir to a private investment bank fortune and beholden to high family expectations. Nevertheless, the attraction is instant, and what starts out as sexual obsession turns into something greater, stranger, and impossible to ignore.
The unlikely couple moves to Manhattan in hopes of forging an adult life together, but Jamey’s family intervenes in desperation, and the consequences of staying together are suddenly severe. And when a night out with old friends takes a shocking turn, Jamey and Elise find themselves fighting not just for their love, but also for their lives.
White Fur follows these indelible characters on their wild race through Newport mansions and downtown NYC nightspots, SoHo bars and WASP-establishment yacht clubs, through bedrooms and hospital rooms, as they explore, love, play, and suffer. Jardine Libaire combines the electricity of Less Than Zero with the timeless intensity of Romeo and Juliet in this searing, gorgeously written novel that perfectly captures the ferocity of young love.
"Each page crackles with the intensity, fury, lust, and pure insane pleasure of first love. Jardine Libaire has written a chronicle of one couple's wild romance: its highs and lows, its delights and contractions, its beauty and its messiness. A delight to read."—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix
“Two barely-20-somethings from opposite sides of the tracks fall in frantic love amid the lush grit of New York City in the 1980s…The real strength of the novel is its Technicolor atmosphere: Libaire’s New York is a glittering whirlwind, raw and sweaty and intoxicating. A page-turning whirlwind steeped in pain and hope.”—Kirkus Reviews
“[The] setting is viscerally exposed and uniquely gritty, and Libaire’s meaty, brazen, Ferrari-fast sentences prop it up well.” —Booklist
"Brilliantly written and deeply felt, this is a love story by turns comic and tragic, but always moving. Whether her characters are on the social register or the welfare roll, Libaire is a keen observer of human nature.”—Philipp Meyer, author of The Son
“A love story of equal parts grit and glamour, I loved White Fur for its honest portrait of the extremes of American society, and the love that can bloom anywhere, always, despite the odds. Jardine Libaire is an extraordinary talent.”—Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of The Language of Flowers
"White Fur is glorious: dark, dirty, and sexy, lit up with yearning and raw, young love. Libaire's sentences left me breathless. This is a Roman candle of a novel. I absolutely loved it."—Amanda Eyre Ward, author of The Nearness of You and What Was Lost
"This sexy American fairytale about a star-crossed couple solidifies Jardine Libaire’s status as poet laureate of late nights and young love."—Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks Is Dead
Rights: Hogarth, North America; Weidenfeld & Nicholson, UK; Presses de la Cité, France
Television Rights: Film Nation
HERE KITTY KITTY (2004)
Lee is the consummate party girl, living a decidedly consequence-free existence. She has the right clothes-the Helmut Lang heels and vintage Dior dresses-the right job managing a stylish SoHo restaurant, the right shabby-chic apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and the right pager number to get the right drugs. She even has the right boyfriend-a wealthy Frenchman who bails her out of trouble whenever she teeters too close to the edge. Lee knows youth and beauty can only protect her from her wild life for so long. But when the lights go down at closing time, the energy of the city begins to pulse. It is a call she can't resist, and she follows it to backrooms and warehouse raves, to loft parties and after-hours clubs, fueled by the liquids and powders whose names begin to blur, pursuing the elusive thrills of the New York night. Libaire's voice, like her heroine, is tough, seductive, and hard-hitting, and she paints a city that only the young and reckless experience-a place where glamour and danger are just flip sides of the same thrilling coin.
"They say the best nonfiction reads like fiction. But is the reverse also true? It would seem so after reading this gorgeously written debut novel, whose narrator is so keenly evoked that her reminiscences read like a memoir."—Publishers Weekly
"First-novelist Libaire jams her paragraphs with fractured images of the cityscape, brand-name clothing, trendy neighborhoods, and after-hours clubs....[Readers] will be seduced by her cinematic writing and her vulnerable hipsters."—Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
Rights: Little, Brown, World English
THE UPPER CLASS SERIES (THE UPPER CLASS; MISS EDUCATED; OFF CAMPUS; CRASH TEST) with Hobson Brown and Taylor Materne (2007-2008)
A four-part YA series set in the privileged but fraught world of an elite East Coast boarding school (by authors who met while attending Hotchkiss together in the nineties).
Rights: HarperCollins, North America