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Thought Catalog Books
January 2026
On Sale: January 16, 2026
184 pages
ISBN: 1965820212
EAN: 9781965820216
Kindle: B0GF3XCNWQ
Paperback / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction Literary
From Emily Singer — Los Angeles-based writer, director, and founder of creative agency Elsi. Featured in Bustle and Wonderland Magazine. "Doll Baby" is her debut novel.
This novel is a fully realized work of literary fiction in the tradition of the female coming-of-age novel — lyrical, dirty, funny, and structurally built around a decade of one girl's becoming.
Jolie is wild, magnetic, and quietly brutal. There's a lyrical fatalism to her — she's in on the joke of her own self-destruction but can't quite stop it, or perhaps doesn't want to. Hungry for validation, deeply romantic, sharp enough to see exactly what's happening to her and not quite capable of changing it yet. Over ten years — fifteen to twenty-five — she moves through the sunburned San Fernando Valley and the seductive ruins of Hollywood: college dorm rooms, strip malls, rooftop parties, the arms of men who can't hold her right. She looks to relationships, friendships, beauty rituals, and the gaze of others to tell her who she is. Until, gradually and then all at once, she stops.
Singer grew up in Calabasas. "Doll Baby" carries the grain of lived experience in every sentence. She describes writing it as "a trust fall into myself," and the result reads like a diary written by someone who knows exactly how it sounds from the outside and writes it anyway. The style is cinematic and intimate simultaneously — Singer brings a filmmaker's sense of pacing and scene-making to prose that never loses its poetic charge.
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