A searching, buoyant novel about queer love, mothers and daughters, and making a life in the face of the only constant: loss. Every story is a love story. In a Barcelona redolent with Almodóvar vibes, the love is between women: overlapping and messy attachments between friends, young lovers, mothers and daughters.

As Sara’s mother dies, her daughter is in bed with a new obsession. She’s wracked with guilt, but the persistence of need, the demands of the body, refuse to take a dignified pause for the observance of another body leaving this world. If one of the projects of growing up is being defeated by the limits of control we have over ourselves and others, the frustration of trying and failing to be understood, then Sara’s loss, her lovers, and her longterm girlfriend are her passage from 28 and casting about to a little bit older and a little bit more sorted out.

If love is “more like a quagmire than anything else—sometimes sombre, sometimes blinded by light,” then X Is Where I Am is one young woman’s fractious, hopeful, attempt to give in to it.