
What It's Like in Words
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Victoria Blunt
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By:
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Eliza Moss
About this listen
Eliza Moss's intoxicating debut novel is a dark, intense, and compelling account of what happens when a young woman falls in love with the wrong kind of man.
Enola is approaching 30 and everything feels like a lot. The boxes aren’t ticked and she feels adrift in a way she thought she would have beaten by now. She wants to be a writer but can't finish a first draft; she romanticizes her childhood but won’t speak to her mother; she has never been in a serious relationship but yearns to be one half of a couple that DIYs together at the weekends.
Enter: enigmatic writer. Enola falls in love and starts to dream about their perfect future: the wedding, the publishing deals, the house in Stoke Newington. But the reality is far from perfect. He’s distant. But she’s a Cool Girl, she doesn’t need to hear from him every day. He hangs out with his ex. But she's a Cool Girl, she’s not insecure. Is she? He has dark moods. But he’s a creative, that’s part of his ‘process’. Her best friend begs her to end it, but Enola can’t. She's a Cool Girl.
She might feel like she’s going crazy at times, but she wants him. She needs him. She would die without him...That's what love is, isn’t it? Over the next twenty-four hours (and two years), everything that Enola thinks she knows is about to unravel, and she has to think again about how she sees love, family, and friendship and—most importantly—herself.
With notes of Fleabag & I May Destroy You but with the sparseness and emotional accuracy of writers like Ali Smith and Lily King, What It's Like in Words is a close examination of what it means to experience the intense emotional uncertainty of first love.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.
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Critic reviews
"What It’s Like in Words is a consuming portrait of a young woman building and rebuilding herself from the wreckage of her past lives. Eliza Moss masterfully renders how it feels to be ruled by grief and toxic obsession, and what it takes to break out of a prison of your own making. Devastating and tender, What It’s Like in Words is a love letter to friendship, art-making, and the messiest parts of ourselves."—Ruth Madievsky, national bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy
"With echoes of Sally Rooney and Lily King, Eliza Moss is a fresh new voice who exquisitely captures the quirks of what it means to be imperfectly human and beautifully fragile. This book reads like poetry."—Neely Tubati Alexander, author of Love Buzz and In a Not So Perfect World
"I devoured What It's Like in Words with breathless admiration for Eliza Moss's raw, propulsive story of toxic love and obsession. Enola, our painfully vulnerable heroine, inspired and infuriated me in equal measure as she repeatedly took two steps forward and one step back. I wanted to shake her but also give her a hug, as she reminded me of so many women who struggle to confront terrible truths about people they've chosen to love. The writing—gorgeous, crystalline, tender—is ultimately an ode to the rejuvenating friendship between Enola and her best friend Ruth. If you enjoyed Genevieve Wheeler's Adelaide, Carola Lovering's Tell Me Lies, and the work of writers Dolly Alderton and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, you'll tear through this dark and addictive debut about a woman learning, finally, to value herself."—Caitlin Barasch, author of A Novel Obsession
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Story
From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE, a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.
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Beauty is Possible
- By Norine on 01-14-25
By: E.K. Sathue
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Kingdom of No Tomorrow
- By: Fabienne Josaphat
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Nettie Boileau joins the Black Panthers’ Free Health Clinics in Oakland in 1968 and is soon swept up in an all-consuming love affair with Melvin Mosley, a defense captain of the Black Panther Party. When Nettie and Melvin head to Chicago to help launch the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, they find themselves targets of J. Edgar Hoover’s famous covert campaigns against civil rights leaders. As she learns more about the inner workings of the Panthers, Nettie discovers that fighting for social justice may not always mean equal justice for women.
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Captivating
- By Amazon Customer on 04-03-25
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Deadly Animals
- A Novel
- By: Marie Tierney
- Narrated by: Olivia Dowd
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Ava Bonney is a compassionate and studious fourteen-year-old girl with a dark secret: she has an obsessive interest in the macabre. She is fascinated by the rate at which dead animals decompose. The highway she lives by regularly offers up gifts of roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava loves nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings. One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate and, fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police.
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“𝘎𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘨𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘨𝘴 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶’𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘶𝘦𝘭 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.”
- By A.B. | @kindaspooky_reads on 11-15-24
By: Marie Tierney
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The Verifiers
- By: Jane Pek
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Claudia is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls—and that she's just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency.
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Loved!
- By Taylor on 03-01-22
By: Jane Pek
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Rental House
- A Novel
- By: Weike Wang
- Narrated by: Jen Zhao
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.
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Flat storyline with monotone narration
- By Julia on 01-02-25
By: Weike Wang
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Cursed Bread
- A Novel
- By: Sophie Mackintosh
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Still reeling in the aftermath of the deadliest war the world had ever seen, the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit collectively lost its mind. Some historians believe the mysterious illness and violent hallucinations were caused by spoiled bread; others claim it was the result of covert government testing on the local population.
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boring
- By Anonymous User on 02-23-25
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The Idiot
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary.
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Fascinating point of view
- By Amazon Customer on 04-21-17
By: Elif Batuman
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Pictures of You
- A Novel
- By: Emma Grey
- Narrated by: Kristy Best, Nic English
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the global breakout bestseller The Last Love Note comes the story of a young woman struggling to piece her life back together in the wake of a tragic accident, and the man who gives up everything to help her. When Evie Hudson wakes in an unfamiliar hospital room, she thinks she’s fresh out of a teenage party with her best friend, Bree. Except, Bree isn’t around anymore and high school was years ago. Evie had just survived the crash that killed her husband, Oliver—whom she can't remember either.
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Intricate, thought provoking but still a fun ride.
- By cnrkrc on 12-01-24
By: Emma Grey
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Still Life at Eighty
- The Next Interesting Thing
- By: Abigail Thomas
- Narrated by: Abigail Thomas
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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While reflecting on the past, Abby accepts the shape of her present. No more driving, no more dancing, mostly sitting in a comfortable chair in a sunny corner with three dogs for company—as well as the birds and other critters that she watches out her window. Only this beloved writer could generate so much enthusiasm over what might seem so little. Vivid memories fall like confetti, as time contracts, shoots forward, loops and suddenly she is back in her twenties in New York City, drinking, sleeping with strangers, falling in and out of love, believing in a better world.
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Not for me
- By Kathy Mag on 01-03-25
By: Abigail Thomas
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I Could Live Here Forever
- A Novel
- By: Hanna Halperin
- Narrated by: Megan Trout
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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When Leah Kempler meets Charlie Nelson in line at the grocery store, their attraction is immediate and intense. Charlie, with his big feelings and grand proclamations of love, captivates her completely. But there are peculiarities of his life—he’s older than her but lives with his parents; he meets up with a friend at odd hours of the night; he sleeps a lot and always seems to be coming down with something. He confesses that he’s a recovering heroin addict, but he promises Leah that he’s never going to use again.
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Profound
- By Anonymous User on 05-03-23
By: Hanna Halperin
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Simple Passion
- By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
- By Kimberly on 10-17-22
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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End of Active Service
- By: Matt Young
- Narrated by: Sam Rushton
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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What was it like? It’s the only thing anyone wants to know about war--and the last thing Corporal Dean Pusey wants to talk about, at least not with one of these fat and happy civilians crowding the bar. Dean is two months free from the Marine Corps, and life back in his Indiana hometown is anything but peaceful. That’s when the woman next to him offers to buy him a drink.
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Real in a Surreal Way
- By Mark L. Berry on 04-16-25
By: Matt Young
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The Close-Up
- By: Pip Drysdale
- Narrated by: Billie Fulford-Brown
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A struggling author discovers the dark side of fame when a stalker begins reenacting violent events from her thriller in this electrifying and twisty new novel.
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Overall good
- By P-Sandwich on 01-27-25
By: Pip Drysdale
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Sister Snake
- A Novel
- By: Amanda Lee Koe
- Narrated by: Zoë Chao
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim and using her charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret: once, they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang dynasty China. A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together.
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LOVED everything about it!!
- By lavici on 12-14-24
By: Amanda Lee Koe
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A Home for the Holidays
- A Novel
- By: Taylor Hahn
- Narrated by: Anna Caputo
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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For wedding singer Mel Hart, the holidays have always retained a certain magic. Her mother, Connie, always managed to pull off spectacular Santa hijinx that convinced Mel to keep believing in Santa way longer than other kids. Those moments meant everything to Mel because the rest of the year, life was unpredictable because of her mother’s alcohol use. But two weeks before Christmas, Mel gets a call from the hospital: her mother has died.
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Cozy, heartwarming read!
- By Amazon Customer on 10-01-24
By: Taylor Hahn
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Thirst for Salt
- By: Madelaine Lucas
- Narrated by: Madelaine Lucas
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me. It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life.
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Beautifully written novel ruined by weak story
- By K. Schuster on 05-30-23
By: Madelaine Lucas
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The Shutouts
- A Novel
- By: Gabrielle Korn
- Narrated by: Gail Shalan
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 2041, and it's a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly's on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she's no longer sure she believes in.
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Chilling and gorgeous
- By Steve on 12-11-24
By: Gabrielle Korn
What listeners say about What It's Like in Words
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Denise Emery
- 12-26-24
unique and engrossing
if you've ever been in a bad relationship, or listened to a friend who has experienced one, this book is for you. The author puts it all in perspective with insightful prose in an inspiring heartfelt story. Both the story and the ending will stay with you long after the book has been read.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Kayla Giboney
- 12-20-24
Underwhelming
Really confusing to listen to. I just didn’t understand it and it was underwhelming for the reviews it had
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