Excerpt from Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But all of these things, even taken together, fail to explain the joy. They are reasons, not causes. Insufficient. Ad hoc. The more I lay them out, the more the joy seems alien, fantastic. A magic trick. Something that descended upon us without concern for our worthiness, our effort, the facts of our lives, even without our consent. Our life of joy was, qualitatively, no different from the life that had felt unbearable to me just months before. What had changed—the season, the brand of yogurt I ate in the mornings—couldn't account for the sheer ebullience of those days. Yes, it was after the hospital, but not immediately after. Yes, we had decided not to have children, but that was a decision we'd made many times before, it had never rung out across our lives the way the joy did, chime and echo. Yes, the bills had passed the state legislatures, but mostly earlier, in the spring, and we had been angry then, and afraid. They went into effect that summer, but this can't be the reason for the joy, no more than flood or wildfire or the temperatures, which regularly broke the sort of records you don't want to break. Everything is moving in the wrong direction. Nothing maps to the joy's earliest hours precisely. Its tendrils reach back, back. When did we first feel it? Was it the week we lost internet at the cabin, when I worked from a nearby bar, helping families in states with gender-affirming care bans access care for their kids without saying the word gender, the word ban? Was it the week the beloved trans comic book writer died and everyone on the boards spoke not about grief (the grief a given) but about the near miracle of the cause of her death—not suicide, not homicide, just her body giving out the way bodies eventually do? I don't know. Other people, maybe, have memories arranged like coat hangers along time's linear axis, marching left to right, all of them neatly in the past tense or—if you select one—shifting obediently to the past perfect to mark the divide between past (selected, remembered, continuous) and past past. My memories are mostly bucketed. A bucket for stress. A bucket for shame. Some would pathologize this.

An impairment in the ability to place stimuli in context with what came before and after leaves people with autism struggling with a seemingly capricious world that makes excruciating demands on their attention—this is something I read in a Los Angeles Times article summarizing a scientific paper titled Autism as a Disorder of Prediction, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and made famous, at least on the boards, by Mad Eden.

Capricious, that word whose origin might be the Latin capra—goat—or the Italian capo—head—plus riccio—hedgehog. A goatlike world, a hedgehog world. Sure. There's a reason the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping Baphomet. There's a reason the devil, that ancient dragon, has cleft hoof and curving horn. Bucketing serves me well enough. It lets me down only when, as now, I need to find a beginning. Where does a full bucket begin? At the well or the spring or the goat's teat. In short, elsewhere.

It might have been the week Quentin, who was not our child, at least not by blood nor in any legal way, though he called himself our child, or sometimes our son, came to visit. He stopped by on his way to start college in Missouri, a summer semester. His visit was a surprise—we'd thought he'd start in the fall—which disqualifies it immediately from the bucket of joy, but it butts up against it, sits adjacent to it. Why not begin there?

He arrived on a bus up from Tampa. Liam met him at the station, left the house with the frenetic, anxious care that characterized their interactions with Quentin. When the two of them returned home I was sitting in the dark. How long had Liam been gone? I don't know. Liam calls this temporal dissociation dog time, since it causes us to greet each other enthusiastically whether the other has been gone minutes or days, but in this instance I don't greet them enthusiastically. I don't greet them at all. I am wholly absorbed. I am reading Mad Eden. That should place it in time for you. I'm reading the first installment, which has just been posted to the boards. Liam says, "Hello? Honey, I'm home?" Liam says to Quentin, "Ignore them, they're being rude. You're being rude, Ro." I half hear it. I am reading. Mad Edenbegins like this:

Excerpted from Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas. Copyright © 2026 by Morgan Thomas. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.