Also available as an audiobook via Audible, narrated by Chelsea Hodson

More Praise for Tonight I'm Someone Else:

"Chelsea Hodson tests herself against her desires, grapples with their consequences, and presents a surgically precise account of what they were to her. These essays are bewitching―despite their discipline and rigor, you can smell the blood." ―Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments and The Two Kinds of Decay 

“Chelsea Hodson is my favorite essayist. Her work is like the desert: clean and mysterious and full of skeletons. I'll make a prediction: Tonight I'm Someone Else will go down as a classic.” ―Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book

"Her essays are a specialized artform where poetry meets philosophy. They reflect on the gruesome side of being a woman in the excellent tradition of Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath. I highly recommend Chelsea Hodson's book to all readers." ―Atticus Lish, author of Preparation for the Next Life

"This book has dark humor, recklessness, exhilaration... I felt I was reading a writer who would tell harder truths than many other writers, and she turns this nerve against herself to good effect.” ―Amy Hempel

"A simultaneously bewildering and compelling body of work." —Kirkus Reviews

"The experience of reading these essays is akin to careening down a desert road on a bike with no brakes while a perfectly full moon hangs plump... reading Hodson's work feels risky; it's breathtaking." —Nylon

"Tonight I’m Someone Else is suffused with hunger and desire, vulnerability and violence – all delivered with calm, bare-faced aplomb. Hodson’s essays defy easy resolution and finitude, avoiding a single interpretation in favour of the suggestive, as if we inhabit a state of mind, rather than a particular story." —The White Review

"I’m so blown away by Chelsea Hodson that I almost don’t know what to say. Tonight I’m Someone Else is thoughtful, insightful, and so affecting that it’s painful." —Hello Giggles

"These essays are sexy but they have stars in their eyes. They’re reckless and dramatic, but somehow concurrently tender and clean... Tonight I’m Someone Else is a debut unlike any other I’ve read in a long time." —The Public

"On a line level, Tonight I'm Someone Else might be the book of the year. These essays are lyrically precise and impeccably formed." —Largehearted Boy

"A unique collection about being an artist and a woman in a world that doesn't always value either." —Booklist

"Beautiful and poetic at moments, jarring and like an out-of-body experience at others, this collection is a must-have." —Book Trib

"There’s just something about [Hodson's] lines —'How lovely to be young enough not to know any better' or 'I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own' (both from 'Simple Woman') —that demands furious underlining and exclamation points in the margins." —Longreads

"[Tonight I'm Someone Else is] precise about the most mysterious things, cool, and thoughtfully exploratory. From the title on, [this book] draws upon a concentrated attention to self that leads continually toward something new." —The Believer

"This sad, smart essay collection... feels much like staring at your own face in a shattered mirror." —Philadelphia Weekly

"Read this startlingly honest essay collection and beware: You will emerge utterly changed." —Refinery29

"It’s a lesson in essay craft to study how Hodson builds these stacks of art. Tonight I’m Someone Else is a collection that’s also in thick conversation with other writers and thinkers such as Édouard Levé, James Richardson, and Arthur Rimbaud… a writer’s writer, a lover’s writer, an artist’s writer, and a dreamer’s writer." —Brooklyn Rail

"This essay collection is shape-shifting, and Hodson’s voice has got me under a spell of sorts. I am making my way through it and going from awe to exhilaration to discomfort, and back to awe." —Literary Hub

"Few other writers I’ve read so lucidly capture that generational sense of wrestling with precarity, admitting the choices we make in refusing one kind of work for the next, the struggle to earn, the obsessional, prioritised drive of writing itself." —Glasgow Review of Books

"My favorite book of the summer so far." —The Strategist

"These essays gush with impossible paradoxes: We don't know what we want, and we don't like it when we get it; we want love to make us whole, but its whole job is to ruin us; we're looking for the one, but we all contain multitudes." —The Stranger

"Desire, admiration, aspiration, envy: the essays in Chelsea Hodson’s collection know this surge, they ride it effortlessly.” —The Lifted Brow

"A 'beach read' for Wednesday Addams." —The Citizen Times

"Lyrical essays are a fascinating and revealing literary form. In recent years, authors like Maggie Nelson and Chelsea Hodson have helped define the limitless of them." —Thrillist

"[Chelsea Hodson] has a particular ability to blend immediacy with a sharply rendered sense of distance; the combination makes for a memorable experience." —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Kendall Jenner and Emma Roberts with their copies of Tonight I’m Someone Else.

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About the Book

A highly-anticipated collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good…refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect.

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. In these essays, she asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.

Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre—including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission— Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship. Both tender and jarring, this collection is relevant to anyone who’s ever searched for what the self is worth.

Hodson’s accumulation within each piece is purposeful, and her prose vivid, clear, and sometimes even shocking, as she explores the wonderful and strange forms of desire. This is a fresh, poetic debut from an exciting emerging voice, in which Hodson asks “How much can a body endure?” And the resounding answer: "almost everything."

Book Trailer

Original song written and performed by Chelsea Hodson.