Not Something We Discuss Often

essays

a chapbook of womanhood and illness

released November 2022 from Small Harbor Press!

“Cedeño’s determined to get to the bottom of…things, which, of course, no one ever does. Her writing makes you thankful for that fact.  We don’t want to stop reading these essays.”

-Steve Fellner, author of Eating Lightbulbs and All Screwed Up

Support your local independent bookstore!

Not Something We Discuss Often

is available at Lift Bridge Book Shop at 45 Main Street, Brockport, NY

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When I first read Sarah Cedeño’s ‘Future Care Instructions for Your Wife with Multiple Sclerosis’ in Brevity, I was stunned by the vulnerability, clarity, love, pain—and humor: ‘Ask me to shovel the walkway,’ her future self tells her future husband, ‘and pretend I’ve done it.’ In essays you’ll return to again and again, Cedeño makes space for everything, all together. Read her debut collection, Not Something We Discuss Often, and see how the path to navigate our broken, beautiful lives becomes brighter.

-Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

“In her book of essays, Not Something We Discuss Often, Sarah Cedeño writes, ‘Maybe I worried what kind of mess I’d become.’  Her worry drives these essays with strategic tentativeness and gentle self-effacement. Bless the world for making her life a chaos of illness, delicate family issues, and flawed, enduring love. Cedeño’s determined to get to the bottom of these things, which, of course, no one ever does. Her writing makes you thankful for that fact.  We don’t want to stop reading these essays.”

-Steve Fellner, author of Eating Lightbulbs and All Screwed Up

In Not Something We Discuss Often, Sarah Cedeño offers up “a more complicated vision” of a life—her life—one in which pain and joy co-exist. In prose that is both beautiful and brave, Cedeño confronts the daily indignities of living with a chronic and disabling illness and envisions a future of total dependence. Cedeño refuses to look away from the hard and inevitable truth and in doing so, she offers up instruction on how to live.”

  -Sarah Freligh, author of We