Exploring the hazy line that can exist between friendship and desire, this memoir-in-essays is a coming out story that chronicles the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood of Julia Koets, who grows up entrenched in religion in a small town in the South.

“I grew up in the church,” writes Julia Koets, “the way some people grow up in a neighborhood.” And around that sentence, The Rib Joint examines what it means to live inside a structure that both feeds and starves you at once—especially if you’re queer. With radical intuition, Koets thinks about the price of secrets, implying at every turn that love and lies can’t share the same space. A brilliant, unsettling book.

There’s so much to admire in Julia Koets’s first book of essays. She demonstrates enormous skill at turning a subject inside out, revealing clinical interest in that subject while spinning lyrical connections between abstract ideas and detailed memories.

—The Gertrude Press

— Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship

Engaging, poignant, and at times wryly humorous, this book explores gender and identity through the eyes of a sensitive and perceptive young woman growing up in the South. Julia Koets writes with vulnerability, warmth, and a lyrical style that pulls the reader straight through to the end.
— Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden

The lyric essay form, reliant on gaps and fragmentation, beautifully aligns with Koets' own experience of compression and expansion, as her narrator moves from a closeted existence to one of self-acceptance and personal liberation. Her memoir demonstrates the profound costs of rejection, silencing, and exclusion within powerful social systems, where love and inclusion often hinge on self-denial. —Magin LaSov Gregg, Brevity's Nonfiction Blog

Mentioned in University of South Florida's newspaper The Oracle