Tag: Rae Cline

Rae Cline is the author of the story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review and StoryQuarterly, among other publications. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg and lives in New York City. Precious Ugly, her debut novel, was a finalist for the Curt Johnson Prose Award for Fiction and shortlisted for Craft’s First Chapters Award. Read more at raecline.com.

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What Will You Take? A Precious Ugly Book Club Activity

You can take five things in the canoe with you before you escape. What will you take?

In Precious Ugly, Clementine is thirteen years old and living in a van with her father, a preacher and cult leader, on a campsite in Harpers Ferry. She must decide if the miracle he promises will save her or destroy her.

It was an image that stuck with the girl, the woman standing in the middle of the road and staring at the driver and daring him to do something. And as the girl grew older she held to this image, held it close, wanting desperately to do the same, to stand in the road and stare him down, stare him down, but she was just a girl, his girl. She would always be his girl and what was in a stare anyway?

It is 1985. The country clings to faith under the threat of nuclear war, economic recession, and an AIDS crisis about which no one wants to speak. Clementine must rely on herself and strangers to survive the addictions and sins of her family and discover for herself what it means to be safe. What it means to be seen.

Book Club Activity

What five things should Clementine take with her in the canoe? Explain your choices, including how she might acquire them on the campsite.

The activity comes from the Precious Ugly Book Club Kit, along with discussion questions, historical context, music, recipes and further reading.

 

Download the Precious Ugly Book Club Kit

Explore the Book Club Kit

 

Spoiler notice: The kit discusses Precious Ugly in its entirety, including the ending.

Reading Precious Ugly with your book club? Invite Rae Cline to join the conversation.

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#IAMJANEDOE

You probably don’t need to ask your mother or sister or daughter or grandmother or friend or frenemy or the neighbor woman down the road you never speak to or the woman who rides the same elevator as you at 7 am…. if she at any point survived and is surviving sexual assault that happened in the home, at school, at work, at church, at the store or in the alley or in the car or on the car or behind the car or beside the car or a tractor or a lawn mower or a desk or a sassafras tree. You don’t need to ask if she survived or is surviving multiple scenarios of sexual assault in various locations by one or more men. When you see that look in her eye like she is seeing into the deeper parts of you, the parts that tell her if you are a person on which she should ever turn her back because she can see these things, now, in people, you will know that she has a story of many chapters and many scenes and many people and not a single one of them are any of your fucking business unless she decides to share them with you at a time and at a location and in a way of her choosing. That’s all. Proceed.

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Where Moral Authority Begins | Part VI: The Ohio River Valley, Holden Caulfield and the Seduction of False Prophets

Americans have always been drawn to figures of spiritual power. Revival preachers, family patriarchs, cultural icons, presidents. So often, we mistake confidence for capability, narcissism for strength, repetition for truth. The false prophet employs a performative brand of certainty that outlasts objective, empirical reality—the child who reports the abuse or the woman who saw it happen or the person who witnessed it and refuses to believe the lie doesn’t matter because everyone else has already agreed to accept the systemic ease of deception. The lie becomes the truth and they who wield it best become a sort of prophet, the moral authority, because the lie is the story that will come true, regardless.

The Catcher in the Rye celebrated its 75th birthday this year. I am curious about J. D. Salinger’s character, Holden Caulfield, a quintessential reflection of American infatuation with dishonesty: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful.” What I also find curious are the ways that Salinger and my hometown Marietta, Ohio, intersect.

Like Holden, my life has been a search for moral clarity through the lies that began in Marietta. When I finally landed in Murray Hill, I thought Manhattan would be an entirely new chapter, an exclamation point leaving behind girlish origins and trading one version of America for another. What I found was quite the opposite. I found a connected origin story with many threads.

1970s Marietta was fishing on the river and Woolworths, where we sat at the soda counter with ice-cream floats. It was the Marietta Beer Barn, a funny little beer and soda store in a building made of concrete block with a giant cooler on one side and a drive-thru middle. The men took your money and filled your trunk with Budweiser and you never had to get out of your car. Marietta was summer afternoons walking over the bridge for a new pair of Levis at my Uncle Wayne’s Working Man’s Store. Marietta was also the Betsey Mills Club, where I learned to swim and plié from a one-time New York City ballerina who wielded a yard stick similar to Debbie Allen’s cane in Fame. The Betsey Mills was central to Marietta social life, a club devoted to young women transitioning from rural life to town living with rows of Victorian mansions along the river. The Victorian mansions were glorious, some built by the Ivy League magnates who established the city of Marietta, some by river boat captains. With all its small town grandeur, Marietta was most importantly family and church every Sunday, without fail, with Sunday dresses and Sunday hats and change to put in the offering plate. What I didn’t know, growing up, was Marietta’s dark past…. READ THE FULL ESSAY

Essay originally published at Eckleburg.

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Precious Ugly on the Shelf at Bookstar Barnes & Noble in Studio City, California

Precious Ugly at Barnes & Noble in Studio City, California on October 8, 2026

About Bookstar Barnes & Noble

Half a block west of Laurel Canyon Blvd, Bookstar/Barnes & Noble Studio City harkens back to the golden age of Hollywood. Located in a vintage movie theater with a cozy, neighborhood feel, your next great read is just a recommendation away!

Studio City Theatre
12136 Ventura Blvd.
Studio City, CA 91604

Precious Ugly was spotted at Bookstar on October 8, 2026 by Michael Verrecchia (amav7220)!

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Precious Ugly on the Shelf at The Book Lounge, Meridian, Idaho

Precious Ugly at The Book Lounge in Meridian, Idaho

About The Book Lounge

“We’re the bookshop Meridian didn’t know it needed — until now.

If you’ve ever finished a novel at midnight and immediately needed to talk about it with someone, this place is for you.

The Book Lounge was born from a simple but stubborn belief: that fiction is better with good company, and good company is better with a great drink in hand. We’re a 21+ literary lounge in the heart of Meridian this year — part bookshop, part wine bar, entirely a place where you’re allowed to stay as long as you want.” (The Book Lounge, Meridian, Idaho)

Precious Ugly spotted on The Book Lounge shelves on September 14, 2026 by Josie @j4shawreads!

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Precious Ugly — Domestic Violence Awareness Month

“Precious Ugly may be the year’s most powerful debut, a book that examines domestic violence and generational trauma with a rare empathy that bonds the reader with the protagonist.“

—Largehearted Boy, Book Notes

Precious Ugly is a searing debut novel for readers of Bastard Out of Carolina and Demon Copperhead. Set in the Reagan era, this work of Appalachian literary fiction asks what a girl hopes, inherits and survives.

Clementine is thirteen years old and living in a van with her father, a preacher and cult leader, on a campsite in Harpers Ferry. She must decide if the miracle he promises will save her or destroy her.

“It was an image that stuck with the girl, the woman standing in the middle of the road and staring at the driver and daring him to do something. And as the girl grew older she held to this image, held it close, wanting desperately to do the same, to stand in the road and stare him down, stare him down, but she was just a girl, his girl. She would always be his girl and what was in a stare anyway?”

It is 1985. The country clings to faith under the threat of nuclear war, economic recession, and an AIDS crisis about which no one wants to speak. Clementine must rely on herself and strangers to survive the addictions and sins of her family and discover for herself what it means to be safe. What it means to be seen.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Precious Ugly follows thirteen-year-old Clementine, living in a van with her father — a preacher and cult leader — on a campsite in Harpers Ferry, deciding whether the miracle he promises will save her or destroy her. It’s a story about what a girl hopes, inherits, and survives.

“This is not an easy book, nor should it be. It is a story that needs to be told — it needs to be read.” ★★★★★

— Teresa Brock, Fully Booked in Kentucky (Amazon)

Available wherever books are sold.

Get 15% off at Bookshop.org with code CLINE.

@raeclineauthor · #PreciousUgly

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Where Moral Authority Begins | Part V: The Unbearable Virtue of Superbelt

I was nine or ten when the lashings turned end of day ritual. Before each lashing I was to undress from the waist down—pants and panties—and bend over the edge of the bed they shared, my mother and stepfather whom I called Daddy. She was never in the room, my mother, always somewhere else in the house, doing something. I imagine her, now, drinking a cup of coffee or a glass of pinot grigio or folding laundry or cleaning the kitchen because that was what she often did, clean the kitchen. She liked a tidy home and was good at keeping a tidy home. We left our outside shoes at the door.

I could hear the slide of the belt behind me each time as he pulled it from his slacks. I still have one hanging in my closet, a belt, not the slacks. I don’t remember being whipped with that belt, in particular, but it became a talisman of sorts. It had personality, like an aging college hippie in bell bottoms and loose cotton shirt, the belt low on the hip, swaggering, holding it all together. It is brown leather and wide with a big metal buckle. I wore it nearly every day in grad school at Johns Hopkins then American University. I secretly called it Superbelt, my symbol, my token, my power stolen from his waning youth, reappropriated for my cause.

The Ritual

Daddy’s preferred belt was finer, smooth leather, meant for business. It was not luxurious. It was middle class appropriate. Brown or black, usually, whichever belt he’d chosen to hold up his slacks that morning, which is to say that it was always the belt he wore, never a belt from the closet. I sometimes wondered if he chose the belt in the morning with this in mind, feeding the belt through the loops of his slacks, visualizing ripping it out that evening upon returning home, an effective routine after a hard day’s work like a fresh cocktail waiting in my mother’s hand, a kiss on the cheek. I was the kiss. The belt was his unbearable virtue….

Read the full essay at Eckleburg: “Where Moral Authority Begins | Part V: The Unbearable Virtue of Superbelt“

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Rae Cline to Read at NY Insight’s Artist Salon & Café in New York City

I’ll be reading this Friday, September 18, at NY Insight’s Artist Salon & Café, a monthly gathering for artists and art lovers held at the New York Insight Meditation Center in Chelsea.

The Reading

I’ll be reading a short excerpt from Precious Ugly, alongside a flash fiction, in an intimate setting.

In Conversation

Leading the conversation afterward will be John Madera (editor in chief, Big Other), the person behind Big Other and Rhizomatic. It’s a format built for real conversation rather than a formal panel, so expect it to go wherever the room takes it.

Details

When: Friday, September 18, 2026, 6:00–9:00 PM

Where: New York Insight Meditation Center, 115 W 29th St, Floor 12, New York, NY 10001

More info: nyimc.org/event/artist-salon-9-2026

 

As a New York City resident and founding editor of Eckleburg, I spend much of my time reading other people’s work — readings like this one are a chance to sit on the other side of that for an evening, and to do it close to home. If you’re in New York City, I’d love to see you there.

Precious Ugly is available now at your local bookseller and online.

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Rae’s Fried Catfish | A Precious Ugly Recipe

I learned to catch and clean catfish from my Pappy on the Ohio River. I learned to fry them at home from my Mammy.

In Precious Ugly, Mama doesn’t have all of these ingredients on the campsite. But this is the fried catfish recipe I use at home.

Ingredients

    • fresh catfish filets, preferably from the river
    • milk
    • olive oil
    • butter
    • fresh lemon
    • salt
    • pepper
    • onion powder
    • garlic powder
    • herbs de Provence
    • cayenne
    • sometimes Old Bay 🙂

Prep

    • Soak the filets in milk, refrigerated, for an hour or so
    • Drain filets then salt and let sit for a few minutes
    • Sprinkle pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, herbs de Provence and a little cayenne or Old Bay, depending on your mood for heat

30 Minutes

The best part about fresh catfish from the river is that the prep is quick and the catfish is delicious.

    • Heat the skillet, high heat, add olive oil; when the oil is hot, gently lay each filet into the skillet
    • When the filets brown on  one side, turn over
    • Add butter and lemon while in pan

Remove the fillets from the skillet and rest on paper towels. When plating, add a little melted butter, lemon and salt to taste.