My Friend Natalia

A bold and brave novel about a young woman’s sexuality, the power of narration, and identity.

Natalia cannot stop thinking about sex.

Narrated by an unnamed, ungendered therapist who leaps at the chance to employ their most experimental methods, My Friend Natalia offers a gripping examination of the power dynamics always present but rarely ever spoken about in therapy.

At first, Natalia seems to play along with the rules of therapy. She partakes in the therapist’s pain-displacement exercises, word games, and even produces a few anatomical illustrations. She muses on the art of pornography, and boldly examines seminal figures like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom she poses the question, “Did Jean-Paul consider Simone a woman at all? Or was she nothing but a pencil sharpener?”

By combining philosophy and literature, repressed childhood memories and explicitly unrepressed erotic experiences, the sessions quickly shed all inhibitions. Still, the therapist can’t help but wonder: What does Natalia really want?