Instinct Before Reason

Debbie has always been better at asking questions than answering them. When her old flame Mike invites her to his debut photography exhibition in California, she arrives expecting closure and leaves carrying something far more complicated - a growing suspicion that the careful, defensible life she has been building doesn't quite fit the person she actually is.

Bound for Paris on a research internship, Debbie throws herself into the rigors of academic anthropology, the warmth of a found family of roommates, and the city itself. But the questions that follow her aren't the ones she can footnote. A demanding professor strips away every comfortable answer. An unconventional scholar named Le¯la uses rhythm and embodied practice to help people reconnect with what they already know. And a gentle, easy relationship with her roommate Raph begins to reveal how much of herself she has quietly put aside.

When everything unravels at once - a moment of violence that exposes the gap between what she knows and what she feels, and a chance encounter with a community of people who construct entirely new selves from scratch - Debbie finds herself studying something she didn't plan to: what it means to become someone who trusts their own instincts.

Instinct Before Reason is a sensual, intellectually alive novel about the long and often embarrassing work of growing into yourself. It moves through art shows and rhythm workshops, furry conventions and Parisian landscapes, academic seminars and Christmas Eve streets, tracing one woman's journey from a life she can explain to one she actually wants.