Shelf Awareness Best Book This Week
Storytrade Literary Fiction Finalist
PenCraft Fiction Award Winner
American Book Fest Best Literary Fiction
In the gritty backdrop of rural Pennsylvania, nine-year-old Lulu's encounter with a trucker outside a rundown motel is captured on film by aspiring photographer Quinn who is passing through town. While the image launches Quinn's career, Lulu fights to survive in a volatile home.
Decades later, Quinn's "Lulu and the Trucker" has fetched a staggering price at auction as she's preparing for a retrospective of her work. Lulu, grown and struggling to make ends meet, stumbles upon her own image in the newspaper. Determined and emboldened, she attends Quinn's exhibition talk with a single burning question: Why didn't you help me all those years ago?
Examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed, TELL ME ONE THING boldly asks what each of us owes one another and what we owe ourselves.
TELL ME ONE THING
"A devastating and rich exploration of trauma, art-making, love, and the unmistakable hauntedness of what we cannot control, yet long to. I want everyone to read this book." — Chelsea Bieker author of Madwoman
[A] dynamic, character-driven debut... Schlottman acutely nails the misty, gold-hued atmosphere of the 1980s, and deeply explores themes of class and privilege...This thought-provoking work will put readers on the lookout for what the author does next
— Publishers Weekly (full review)
At the start, the novel moves chronologically, with each section headed by the name and descriptive details of one of Quinn's photographs. Eventually, however, the sections loosen, with one dated 1990 and another titled Time Traveling and dated merely Various. This shift cleverly mirrors the way the novel increasingly blurs lines, leaving readers to question their understanding of such concepts as time, art and success.
— Shelf Awareness "Best Book This Week" (full review)
Sensitive, stunning and staggeringly brilliant. I would give it ten stars if I could.
— Reedsy (full review)
Kerri Schlottman has delivered us the richest of reading experiences. I read Tell Me One Thing voraciously with equal parts intrigue and admiration, thinking how did she pull this off? Slinking expertly between time and location and point of view—the contrasts here are bright and nuanced, honest and vulnerable, jagged yet tender. This is a novel of great heart, examining the lines we draw as we become who we are. A devastating and rich exploration of trauma, art-making, love, and the unmistakable hauntedness of what we cannot control, yet long to. I want everyone to read this book
— Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman
With a clear, empathic gaze, and with a sharp, startling intelligence, Kerri Schlottman's Tell Me One Thing traces two paths—that of artist, and that of subject—through the cruel disparities of the Reagan eighties and beyond. The result is a book that asks enduring questions about what art is for and what we, all of us, owe one another. Tell Me One Thing is phenomenal.
— Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car
At once the expansive story of two women navigating two disparate, intersecting lives, and a thoughtful meditation on the transtemporal power of photography, Kerri Schlottman's Tell Me One Thing is that rare book: an art world novel with heart.
— Rachel Lyon, author of Fruit of the Dead
In Tell Me One Thing, two women's stories begin in an instant—with a shutter click. Divergent yet inextricable, the paths and aspirations of a photographer and her young subject leap and shatter through the passage of four decades and at the mercy of American dearth, all of which Schlottman relays with understated grit and unflinching humanity. As we follow the photographer through seedy 1980s New York to today's commercially sterilized iteration, Schlottman proceeds to vivify a Polaroid snapped in a Pennsylvania trailer park, infusing viscerality and tragedy into a portrait that would have otherwise hung static on a collector's wall. By reframing an object to be admired as a child to be protected, Tell Me One Thing will both compel and confront readers with questions that only the finest of novels can posit
— Jakob Guanzon, author of Abundance
Reading this was a much-needed exercise in empathy, one tempered by clear, endearing prose. In the parallel universes of two unforgettable characters, Schlottman renders on the page a simple and beautiful expression of our shared humanity. In Tell Me One Thing, we see the private struggles of a famed photographer making it in the wild days of New York City and how her seminal work exposes and yet neglects the harsh truth of one of her subjects. My heart broke and rooted for both characters, and long after I’ve turned the last page, I am still thinking of them.
— Cinelle Barnes, author of Malaya: Essays on Freedom
I loved the way Tell Me One Thing follows two women trying to find their ways in the world—Quinn, the starving artist whose work rescues her from grinding poverty, and Lulu, a subject of Quinn’s photography, whose own ways of working only mire her further into destitution and desperation. Kerri Schlottman’s vivid writing skillfully recreates 1980s New York City and rural Pennsylvania; we’re invited to witness both the heady art-world scene of the era and the foundations being set for the opioid epidemic. It’s such a smart and well-crafted novel, bursting with life. I couldn’t put it down
— Amy Schearn, author of Animal Instinct
