Megan Giddings
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megiddings.bsky.social
Megan Giddings
@megiddings.bsky.social
1.7K followers 550 following 680 posts
I wrote Meet Me at the Crossroads (Amistad 2025)The Women Could Fly (Amistad 2022) and Lakewood (Amistad 2020). Boss, I'm tired.
www.megangiddings.com
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megiddings.bsky.social
I was poor for a lot of my life. And so as everyone who’s poor or struggling in capitalism knows, it is the small treats. When they yell at us for spending on the avocado toast, I go the opposite way. I say, You’re working like a dog, you’re underpaid. Get the avocado toast. What’s the point?
From Robby Hoffman's Strategist post: I was poor for a lot of my life. And so as everyone who's poor or struggling in capitalism knows, it is the small treats. When they yell at us for spending on the avocado toast, I go the opposite way. I say, You're working like a dog, you're underpaid. Get the avocado toast. What's the point? (then a long riff on why Robby loves Illy coffee and back to the most important point): You feel like the fanciest bitch. You could have roaches in the house and you have that moment of peace with your gurgling coffee. It's some dignity in your miserable life.
October 31, 2025 at 2:45 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
this is why i've stopped reading 99% of the messages that have come through my website
an insane chatgpt message that begins Megan you are building worlds while juggling words like a magician. An MFA student an executive editor a fiction powerhouse whose stories live in places most writers just dream about. Yet your latest book Meet Me at the Crossroads feels like it's whispering when it should be echoing through the whole literary universe. Later this message promises that if I just respond they will share my work with a private circle of over three thousand eight hundred genuine readers and reviewers.
October 18, 2025 at 2:36 AM
megiddings.bsky.social
Hey Nashville, I'll be reading and talking tomorrow morning at 10 AM in the State Museum! Hopefully see some of you there
a poster for the 37th annual southern festival of books. It reads This weekend! Find me at the festival! October 18 & 19 2025.
October 17, 2025 at 9:40 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
this andrea long chu paragraph sent me into outer space: www.vulture.com/article/post...
a quote from Andrea Long Chu's review of Thomas Chatteron Williams' new slopfest of a book: This is one legacy of 2020: the privatization of social justice. When writers like Williams speak of social justice today, theya re referring almost exclusively to the management of large companies, elite schools, and nonprofits backed by the wealthy. And why? Because critics of social justice tend to inhabit the exact professional milieu where social justice has been most thoroughly integrated with the endless pursuit of profit. It does not occur to Williams to ask why a Fortune 100 company would solicit a lecture from Thomas Chatteron Williams, a Black public intellectual who, just like kendi, tells people how to feel about race for a living. The social-justice warriors whom Williams most despises are not looters or rioters. They are people he encounters in the literary magazines he admires, the conferences he is invited to, and among his students and colleagues at Bard College; many of them are Obama Democrats whom he once regarded as comrades in the post-racial project. Liberal intellectuals like Williams have thus experienced the rise of DEI less as a generalized threat to the democratic oder and more like a personal betrayal by the institutions that they had, until recently, believed it was their job to defend. What they fear most is that liberals like them have been seudced by illiberal habits of thought. In other words, the greatest danger is not he barbarians at the gate; it's the barbarians safely behind it.
August 5, 2025 at 12:14 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
the longest fight running in my household at the moment: would these tulips actually look good in person
a picture of what Breck's calls an ice cream tulip (white fluffy top, deep red petals beneath that mimic a cone shape)
July 31, 2025 at 4:21 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
when I was in New York a few weeks ago, I made a point of seeing the Sherald show at the Whitney. If you can make it, go! "Trans Forming Liberty" is breathtaking in person. One thing about her work I never expected was how BIG and vivid these portraits actually are.
the picture I took of Trans Forming Liberty at the Whitney
July 24, 2025 at 7:04 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
I have thought about this every day since reading about it on Wikipedia a month ago
On 6 March 2013, Boyle caused controversy when he was invited to perform at Russell Brand's BBC Three fundraiser Give It Up for Cmic Relief at Wembley Arena. He made a series of joke about Comic Relief itself; Queen Elizabeth II; Catherine, Princess of Wale; Andy Serkis; Oscar Pistorius; Pope Benedict XVI and the Jimmy Saville sexual abuse scandal. This was deemed so distasteful that his entire six-minute performance was cut out on the broadcast version of the 3.5-hour show.
July 10, 2025 at 12:59 AM
megiddings.bsky.social
Hey Columbus, this Saturday I'll be at the Columbus Book Festival chatting with Kaira Rouda, Maggie Smith, and Cynthia Reeves about The Creative Life from 2:30-3:30 on Author Stage 2 in the Topiary Park. Free and open to the public!
A screenshot from the Columbus Book Festival Schedule. On Author Stage 2 in the Topiary Park: Tell Me Something I Don't Know: The Creative Life. These authors are more than just writers. They are professors, editors, retired journalists, and leaders in the industry and they know what they're talking about. You'll want to take notes!
July 7, 2025 at 1:06 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
every 4th of july party i've trudged past today
a screenshot from sinners where the irish vampire is just having a great time and dance party
July 5, 2025 at 2:11 AM
megiddings.bsky.social
Meet Me at the Crossroads was featured in my favorite newsletter about books, The Maris Review (by @maris.bsky.social) and if you haven't signed up for it, why not? www.themarisreview.com
a screenshot from the Maris Review (to read all of the most recent edition one that made me finally decide to pick up Great Black Hope, click the link above): I love how Megan Giddings writes fiction that invokes the fantastical, but she also manages to speak to the world where we actually live in a real, true way. Meet Me at the Crossroads answers so many of the big questions it asks, but it leaves room for uncertainty along the way. It's the story of twin sisters, Ayanna and Olivia, whose parents both married and divorced young and have diverging religious beliefs. Ayanaa choses to live with her father, a follower of the Church of Fortitude and Blessings. He worships the mysterious doors that have sprung up around the globe, including one in his Michigan hometown. Those who enter through the doors are taken to some other kind of world, one where the living become closer to the dead. Also, every now and then someone bursts into pieces when they go through a door! Ayanna grows up int he shadow of the doors, spending so much time wondering how the doors work, what they're meant to signify. Olivia, meanwhile, lives with her very Catholic mother, but she still loves her sister.
June 18, 2025 at 12:22 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
it is really nice to see me in my favorite what-really-waiting-in-the-checkout-lane-flip-through magazine (aka Woman's World aka a magazine I have had in my head since I was a child as Women World)
a page from Woman's World Magazine featuring their weekly book club picks: Wally Lamb, me, Josie Silver, V.E. Schwab, and Dr. Jessica B. Harris (below each of our names are publicity blurbs that I don't have space to type)
June 17, 2025 at 2:01 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
lucky me to have Meet Me at the Crossroads reviewed in the Washington Post and so kindly: www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...
Meet me at the Crossroads has a lot to say about grief and living in the constant presence of the dead--but it's ultimately a life-affirming book about overcoming depression. Giddings has an unparalleled ability to write about upsetting events while still capturing the tiny joys of being alive. Chief among those joys is finding a group of friends who see you and are willing to help you do foolish things to help you heal. She explores religion as both a response to grief and a nourishing fellowship. A subplot about an abusive ghost feels at times as though it belongs in a different book, but it eventually pays off beautifully. All in All, Meet Me at the Crossroads sparkles with humor and insight, confirming Giddings as one of the best current authors of speculative fiction. There are so many quotable lines, including a description of velociraptors never needing vacations, because for them "stillness was death. Their religion was momentum and fasts."
June 13, 2025 at 4:06 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
over @literaryhub.bsky.social everyone else's answers are interesting and good and I feel like it's clear with me that I am going through it: lithub.com/lit-hub-asks...
lithub question: How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything? I'm skipping over everyone else because they are being nice! Me: We are living in an age where some of the dumbest, most hateful motherfuckers are jumping on TikTok and holding cameras too close to their faces and saying absolute nonsense and people will watch it and say oh, that's insightful. If I want to write my weird books, well, at least that's a little more dignified.
June 10, 2025 at 5:44 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
see you soon!
i'm in chicago june 5th at women and children first at 7; june 6th in milwaukee at boswells, 630 start time; june 8th at Source Booksellers at 2 PM; June 12th in New Orleans at Baldwin & Co; June 17th at 7 PM at White Whale Bookstore at 7 PM; July 12th at 7 Pm at the Columbus Book Festival
June 4, 2025 at 11:49 AM
megiddings.bsky.social
last day to pre-order and the real ones over at Town & Country put Meet Me at the Crossroads on their summer reading list:
a screenshot of Meet Me at the Crossroads from Town & Country's Summer Reading List. The text reads: Megan Giddings, author of Lakewood and The Women Could Fly, is back with Meet Me at the crossroads, a mysterious and mesmerizing work of speculative fiction. In the novel, seven strange doors appears around the world, and many start to believe they are portals to a new world. Black teenagers, twin sisters Olivia and Ayanna, are raised separately after their parents' divorce, but stay close. When one sister disappears (no spoilers here), can the other one grapple with what happened? It's an emotional novel about grief and sisterhood.
June 2, 2025 at 10:08 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
pleasure
PEONIES on my messy coffee table
June 1, 2025 at 8:56 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
Happy to be included!
a screenshot of Meet Me at the Crossroads from the Boston Globe's Summer Reading List. On the left is an inset of the book's cover, to the right: Meet Me at the Crossroads, Teen sisters test the limits of their deep kinship when seven strange doors emerge one summer, seemingly opening into another world. This dazzling speculative novel ponders the sinister side of paradise along with what we risk and what may be recovered in the wake of adventure and exploration (June 3).
May 30, 2025 at 9:43 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
the new york times is also looking forward to reading Meet Me at the Crossroads this summer: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/b...
a screenshot of Meet Me at the Crossroads included in New York Times' 31 Books to Read This Summer. An image of the cover with the following text: "the sudden appearance of seven mysterious doors across the world draws attention from religious sects, covetous billionaires and everyday people who speculate over what lies on the other side. Olivia and Ayanna, two Black teenage siblings in the Midwest, differ in their opinions--Is it a door to nowhere? To a land paved with golden paths?--until one of them accidentally steps through
May 22, 2025 at 2:50 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
and it's been included in a list that feels um (that Megan Giddings has the details at the end warrants the um) but it's one of Goodreads 80 most anticipated summer books
a screenshot sent to me that is titled 80 Books Readers Are Most Excited About This Summer. It reads: meet Me at the Crossroads starts with a compelling spec-fic premise: Seven interdimensional doors appear at various points around the globe. From there, the story tracks inward as two Black teenage sisters try to navigate a heartbreaking disappearance, a subsequent family implosion, and a parade of ghosts both literal and figurative. Author Megan Giddings (Lakewood) has the details.
May 21, 2025 at 4:36 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
also me when i saw this graphic
a screenshot of george costanza saying God will kill me before letting me be successful.
May 15, 2025 at 5:47 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
this rules
Meet Me at the Crossroads was chosen as a Library Reads pick for June (the image has a small insert of the book's cover) it reads Meet Me at the Crossroads, Megan Giddings, Amistad. Seven mysterious doors suddenly appear in different places across the globe, and when they open, they appear to lead to new dimensions in the universe. Two Black twin sisters get caught in the mystery as one sees paradise while the other sees peril. A spellbinding story about the choices that can both bring us together and tear us apart. Blurb by Magen Szwarek, LibraryReads Ambassador, IL
May 15, 2025 at 4:12 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
helloooooooooo, Meet Me at the Crossroads is on @latimes.com's list of 30 Books to read this summer: www.latimes.com/entertainmen...
a screenshot of Meet Me at the Crossroads cover and the following blurb by Lorraine Berry: Giddings deserves a wider reading audience. Her previous two novels have been lauded by critics for their combination of magical realism and modern social and political reality. Ayanna and Olivia are teenage twin sisters whose lives are changed by a mysterious worldwide event. Seven doors open, beckoning those who believe a better world exists through the portal. Giddings interrogates the meaning of fath in a heady novel about love and family.
May 14, 2025 at 1:08 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
hello, let's have a fun, chill time together this summer
a graphic of some of my tour dates for meet me at the crossroads: june 3rd in minneapolis; june 5 in chicago at women and children first; june 6th in milwaukee at boswell book company; june 8 in detroit at source booksellers; june 12 in new orleans at baldwin and co; june 17th in pittsburgh at white whale; missing june 18th in cleveland; and july 12th at the columbus book festival in columbus ohio
May 8, 2025 at 3:57 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
somehow, Meet Me at the Crossroads received a starred Kirkus Review
a screenshot of a starred review of meet me at the crossroads from Kirkus (a top five percent hater in the business), the tagline is a brilliant, magical tale of grief and growth. It begins "A girl contends with family, faith, and loss in a world with doors to other realms. No one knows where the doors came from. They just appeared one day, seven doors around the world that open to a magical, confusing world. Some people go through them and find wonders: plants with druglike properties, the ghosts of loved ones, healing powers. Some go through and immediately "pop." The rest can be read here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/megan-giddings/meet-me-at-the-crossroads/
May 3, 2025 at 1:53 PM
megiddings.bsky.social
the average american has three friends
a screenshot of the main cast of the movie ghost: Swayze up on a step with his arms on the shoulders of his female castmates below, and to the left below, a young demi moore with short hair, and to the right and shoulder to shoulder with demi is a young whoopi goldberg wearing an incredible pair of pants with a paint splotch pattern
May 1, 2025 at 4:17 PM