Becky Albertalli’s books have always felt very personal to us. Whether you related to someone within the Simonverse, a character in her stand-alone books like Kate in Waiting, or even a new face in the What If It’s Us series that she’s written with her IRL BFF Adam Silvera, it feels like there’s always been someone for anyone. But now, for what feels like the first time, she’s mostly writing something herself.
In her latest book, Imogen, Obviously—coming out on May 2, 2023—Becky uses her own coming-out experience as inspiration for her latest stand-alone novel about Imogen and her bisexual awakening. As she figures out her future (including what college she wants to go to), Imogen also tries to find out if what she’s feeling is real or not.
And of course, with Becky writing it, you better expect some fun humor, heartfelt moments, and some sparks flying between Imogen and her new friend Tessa. Curious about all that is going to go down? You can check out the book’s official description below, courtesy of Balzer + Bray:
More From Cosmopolitan
With humor and insight, #1 New York Times bestseller Becky Albertalli explores the nuances of sexuality, identity, and friendship in this timely new novel.Imogen Scott may be hopelessly heterosexual, but she’s got the World’s Greatest Ally title locked down.
She’s never missed a Pride Alliance meeting. She knows more about queer media discourse than her very queer little sister. She even has two queer best friends. There’s Gretchen, a fellow high school senior, who helps keep Imogen’s biases in check. And then there’s Lili—newly out and newly thriving with a cool new squad of queer college friends.
Imogen’s thrilled for Lili. Any ally would be. And now that she’s finally visiting Lili on campus, she’s bringing her ally A game. Any support Lili needs, Imogen’s all in.
Even if that means bending the truth, just a little.
Like when Lili drops a tiny queer bombshell: She’s told all her college friends that Imogen and Lili used to date. And none of them know that Imogen is a raging hetero—not even Lili’s best friend, Tessa.
Of course, the more time Imogen spends with chaotic, freckle-faced Tessa, the more she starts to wonder if her truth was ever all that straight to begin with. . .
And while the wait doesn’t seem that long now, we bet that you’re definitely wanting to read more. Luckily, Cosmopolitan has an exclusive excerpt that features not just one but two chapters that you can check out below!
So make sure you preorder your copy and also grab some of Becky’s previous books while you’re at it because you’re not going to want to put any of them down once you start reading.
An Excerpt From Imogen, Obviously
By Becky Albertalli
Chapter 3
The halls of Lili’s dorm are narrow, with white cinder-block walls, tightly looped gray carpets, and the same rectangular fluorescent light fixtures we have at school. But there are homey touches too—the word hello spelled out in washi-tape block letters, taped event flyers, and a giant white sheet of paper tacked up near the bathroom, half-covered with doodles and handwritten quotes. Right away, I spot one attributed to Lili, written with purple marker in someone else’s handwriting: To be or not to be; that is the chest hair.
I wouldn’t call it a gut punch—more like a tiny, sharp poke beneath my rib cage. Other people’s inside jokes always hit me like that, but I can never quite pin down the feeling. A variation on loneliness, maybe.
“Okay, brace yourself,” Lili says, pulling out her room key. “My room is basically a closet.”
There’s a dry-erase white board stuck to Lili’s door, featuring a chibi-style drawing of two cats with their tails looped into a heart. Taped above it are a pair of cloud-shaped construction-paper signs, just like the ones I’ve seen on most of the doors we passed.
WELCOME, EMILIA
WELCOME, SYDNEY
I let out a laugh as soon as Lili opens the door. “So when you said it’s the size of a closet, you meant Kylie Jenner’s closet.”
“Okay, it’s small for a double!”
“How often does Sydney stay here again?”
She makes a face at me, parking my suitcase next to one of the beds. There are two of them, flush against perpendicular walls, both made with quilts and sheets I recognize from home—Lili’s home. Her favorite rainbow-haired unicorn, Puppy, is tucked under the covers of one of them.
I guess it’s a little on the cozy side—less because the room itself is small, and more because the furniture comes in pairs. Two desks, two dressers, two wardrobes, two short wooden bookshelves. But it’s all so covered in Lili’s familiar clutter, I feel instantly at home. There’s an assortment of Pop-Tarts and granola bar boxes on top of one of the dressers, intermingling with ceramic horse figurines and month-old birthday cards. Her bookshelves are pure chaos—Homer, Virgil, Euripides, and Aristophanes, alongside Madeline Miller, Roxane Gay, and a memoir by someone who used to be on The Bachelor. And of course, Lili’s postcard collection is on full display, sticky- blobbed to the walls in random clusters. Niagara Falls next to the printed cover of Issue 1 of Check, Please! “Tracy Mitrano for Congress” next to “Bem-vindo a São Paulo.”
But above both beds, it’s just photos—rows of prints, sloping subtly downward because Lili’s never met a straight line in her life. The ones above my bed are mostly from this year— group selfies and sunny snapshots of her friends in various combinations. But the ones above Lili’s bed are from home.
I cross her room for a closer look, smiling at the lineup: My family’s barn at sunset, Penn Yan’s Main Street, a double rainbow over Keuka Lake. Small-town New York state in tiny four-by-six glimpses. And mixed throughout: family portraits, childhood pictures. Naturally, there are at least a dozen pictures of Mel, plus the one from my tenth birthday where Lili’s dressed as Mel. I’m standing beside her in that one, dressed as my cat Quincy, and we’re both wearing glow necklaces and holding up our overstuffed trick-or-treat pillowcases. There’s one of Lili and Otávio, ages seven and five, beaming, in matching white Corinthians soccer jerseys—and beside it, taken almost a decade later, Lili literally crying while getting a book signed by Casey McQuiston. She’s even got the photo her mom insisted on snapping two summers ago, the year we scooped ice cream at Seneca Farms. Lili was at the height of her moody black eye- liner phase, glaring over the counter. I’m posed dutifully beside her with a metal scoop and a how-can-I-help-you smile.
But my favorite picture of us is the one from last summer’s Pride, a week after Lili came out. She’s wrapped in a pink, yellow, and turquoise flag, and I’m leaning against her, elbow propped on her shoulder. Edith took the picture, and she must have said something funny right beforehand, because we’re clearly both howling with laughter.
“I love everything about this,” I say, settling onto Lili’s bed. “Ha—thanks.” Lili plops down beside me. Then she stares straight ahead for a moment without speaking. “Okay, we gotta talk,” she says finally.
My heart flips. “Oh—”
“Nothing bad! I mean, not, like, catastrophic? I don’t know.” I nod slowly, and she looks at me. “So. My friends—”
“Seem great! Seriously. They’re so nice.”
“Yeah, no, definitely, but that’s . . .” She trails off, scooping her dark hair off her neck—twisting it up, letting it fall. “I know that was a little weird out there—not because of you,” she adds. “Imogen, no. If you apologize right now, I will actually kill you.”
I press a muffling hand over my mouth, and she laughs.
But then she sighs. “So here’s the thing. My friends here are so queer.”
“So are you.” I pause, furrowing my brow. “Oh, God—do they think—I don’t want anyone to feel unsafe, or—”
“Immy, come on—no one thinks you’re a queerphobe.” She shakes her head at me, smiling. “And yes, I know I’m queer. I’m valid. All of that. I guess it’s just me seeing the way—I don’t know. They have their shit together, you know?”
“Okay—”
“Like Kayla?” she adds. “She came out in middle school. She took a girl to the eighth-grade dance and kissed her on the dance floor. Right in the school gym.”
“Whoa, nice!” I say, cringing before the words have even left my lips. My voice always pitches higher when people talk about girls kissing—which makes literally no sense, seeing as I’m surrounded by queer people 24/7. I know Gretchen finds it annoying sometimes. Though other times, she says it’s adorable, and that I’m an innocent bean with Mommy’s- first-day-at-PFLAG energy. But that just makes me even more self-conscious.
Maybe the awkwardness is just one of those small-town things you have to shake off and unlearn. Apart from Pride Alliance meetings, it’s not like Penn Yan is some sort of queer haven. I can’t even fathom two girls kissing on the dance floor of my middle-school gym. The image doesn’t compute. I know there were one or two gay couples in my grade back then, but it was kind of a quieter thing. Not a secret, but definitely not front and center.
And everyone in Pride Alliance talks about how hard it is to date people from our school. Gretchen says it’s because everyone knows everyone in Penn Yan. And you can’t exactly hold hands with a girl in the cafeteria when your teachers are friends with your homophobic parents. Hypothetically speaking, that is, since Mama Patterson isn’t homophobic and neither are my parents or Lili’s. But I guess homophobia managed to leak into the atmosphere somehow. Even Edith, who’s basically never not been out, hadn’t dated anyone before Zora.
I really wish I could be more casual about this stuff.
“So that’s Kayla,” says Lili. “Tessa and Mika both had girlfriends in high school. Actually, middle school too, for Mika—they were with their ex for, like, five years. And Dec’s from Manhattan, so who even knows? He’s on a whole other level. It’s hard not to feel inadequate, you know?”
“Because you haven’t dated anyone?”
Lili and I used to joke about that a lot. We were the Forever Alone Club. No boyfriends. No random hookups. Just a pair of perpetually single besties who spent way more time hanging around animals than boys.
It’s not that I didn’t want a boyfriend. I did. I do. I fall in and out of crushes all the time. It’s just not something I talk about much—I don’t even get into the specifics with Gretchen and Lili. Crushes have always felt viscerally private to me. I know that’s weird. It’s definitely sort of lonely. But I don’t think being single ever made me feel inadequate.
“It’s not that.” Lili frowns. “Not exactly? I just feel like such a baby queer sometimes. I’d only been out for three months when I got here.”
“They shouldn’t judge you for that.”
“They didn’t.” Lili pauses. “I kind of told them I came out in high school.”
I feel so out of my depth. “Do people really care when you came out?”
“I mean, my friends don’t.” Lili covers her face with both hands. “I don’t know, I was being a dumbass, and—okay.” She gives a short, muffled moan before pulling her hands away. “I have to tell you something.”
Suddenly, it’s summer again—that Sunday evening in June. Lili had been roped into stopping by this girl Brianna’s graduation party, which was exactly as boring and awkward as we’d expected. So we left early. She drove me home. I remember it was raining, just barely, and I was a little hypnotized by the droplets streaking down the passenger window. And then Lili stopped at a red light on Main Street and said my name out of nowhere.
“So I think—I’m probably pan. Like pansexual?”
She was staring straight ahead when she said it, didn’t even miss a beat when the light turned green. But she was biting her lip just like she is now, and I almost wonder—
“Um.” She laughs nervously, and I’m jolted straight back. Lili’s dorm room. Something she needs to tell me. “Promise you won’t hate me,” she says.
Chapter 4
I laugh. “I promise I won’t hate you.”
“Uh. You might.” She blinks, presses her lips together, then starts talking really quickly. “Okay, it was orientation week. Everyone’s hanging out in my room, and I guess somehow the topic of dating came up. So I was sitting there, just—not saying anything, feeling like such an imposter—”
“You’re not—”
“I know! I know it’s ridiculous. Not even sure what was in my head at that point, but I just wanted to be more—legit, I guess? So I was like, ‘Yeah, totally, I totally had a girlfriend,’ except—Immy, I was not selling it. Like, at all.”
“You don’t need to sell anything! You’re already completely legit.”
“I was being a dumbass, remember? So, at the same time, I’m just panicking, because clearly, they were going to see right through me, and it’s like, cool, cool. Everyone’s gonna think I’m a straight girl faking the whole thing, right?”
“You’re—did they?”
“Not at all! Like, they didn’t even question it! They were just like, ‘Oh, nice, how did you two meet?’ So of course now I’m scrambling a little—like, well fucking done, Emilia, have fun making up a fake ex-girlfriend on the spot.” She shuts her eyes briefly. “But then Tessa—she was sitting right where you are, and all of a sudden, she’s like, ‘Oh, is this her?’ And she points to this picture.” Lili scoots sideways, tapping the edge of one photo.
It’s the one where we’re laughing, from Pride. “Oh!” I blush. “She thought—”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s funny,” I say.
“I told her you were,” she says softly.
I laugh a little. “That I’m…your girlfriend?” The word feels weird on my tongue, almost alien.
“Ex-girlfriend. We amicably broke up last summer. I’m so sorry. Ugh. It’s so shitty and creepy, I know.”
I blink. “No! No, it’s—”
“It just—it seemed like such an easy answer at the time. Which is no excuse. I just didn’t think it through. Any of it.” She lets out a panicked laugh. “Like the fact that my quote-unquote ‘ex-girlfriend Imogen’ is a real person they’d be meeting one day.”
I try to wrap my head around it. “So they know I’m me.
They just think we dated?”
Lili presses both hands to her cheeks. “We got together on New Year’s, broke up in July, but that’s it. You’re you, we’re best friends, we grew up together, all of it. Everything else is true. Oh—but you’re queer. They think you’re bi.” She winces a little. “Sorry.”
“No, it makes sense. Of course I am. Would be. If we dated. Obviously.” I nod, really fast.
“Okay, you’re being too cool about this. Immy, I lied! I erased your identity.”
“My straight identity? I don’t think that’s a thing.”
“Stop saying what you think I want to hear! You’re allowed to feel a certain way about this.”
“But it’s not a big deal.”
“The fact that all my friends think you’re queer? And that we dated? You’re cool with that?”
“I mean, why wouldn’t I be?”
Lili shakes her head. “How are you not freaked out? Like, you have to be wondering if I’m secretly in love with you, right?”
“What? No—Lili—I didn’t—”
“I promise I’m not. I’m just saying, you have a right to be kind of unsettled by this. I don’t even mind if you blow my cover. I mean, I mind. But if you want to set the record straight, we totally can. I get it.”
I open my mouth and shut it, head still spinning. I’m a little stuck on the part where Lili thinks I think she’s in love with me.
Which she’s not. And I don’t.
But the fact that she thinks I’m wondering that? Like I’m that special kind of straight person who assumes all queer people can barely keep their pants on around her?
I mean, admittedly, I do wonder sometimes what queer girls think of me. But it’s just the occasional fleeting thought. Definitely not a you-love-me kind of thing.
Not that I’d mind if a queer girl was into me. I’d honestly find it super flattering.
I hug Puppy the unicorn close to my chest. “So it’s just…I’m bisexual? And we used to date, but we’re friends now. And other than that—”
“Just that. Everything else is real, I promise. No fake dates or memories or anything. Just stuff we actually did. Like the ice-cream crawl and all the barn stuff and when we took Mel and Eloise to Watkins Glen. I didn’t change any of that. They just probably think we went home and made out afterward. But we don’t have to talk about that part,” she adds quickly. “I really don’t want to make you uncomfortable—”
There’s a knock. Lili looks at me. “I’m not uncomfortable. Seriously.”
“Okay, well. I fucking owe you one,” she murmurs, before calling out, “Come in!”
The door opens, and a girl in a bathrobe walks in—white, with short, shower-damp, dark hair, holding a plastic toiletry bucket. Obviously Tessa—though her hair was longer in most of Lili’s pictures. There’s something unforgettably open about her face—her big brown Winona Ryder eyes, her Clea DuVall freckles.
“Hey, are we meeting everyone at Winterfield? I can be ready in five. I just—” She stops short. “Oh my God—Imogen, hi! I’m Tessa. Sorry—I usually wear clothes.”
“Hi! Yup. Imogen,” I say. “I wear clothes, too.”
She does this quick, bubbling laugh—like a low-pitched giggle, really—and her smile reminds me of getting your braces off. Not that I’ve ever seen Tessa with braces. No idea if she even had them. I just mean there’s an element of surprise to her smile. A little flash of oh wait.
Then she runs a hand through her hair, and there’s some- thing so boyish about the gesture, it leaves me a little off-balance.
–
“I feel so underdressed next to you,” Lili says, stepping into the stairwell.
I peek down at my skirt. “Do you think I should—”
“No, you look perfect. I’m the one who looks like a zombie camp counselor.” She pauses mid-staircase to pull the backs of her sneakers over her heels. “Hey. You sure you’re okay with everything?”
“You mean the ex-girlfriend thing?”
“I just don’t want you to feel like you can’t be yourself, you know?” She glances back over her shoulder. “Almost there— one more floor.”
We reach the bottom, and Lili leads me into a hallway that looks just like hers—cinder-block walls and wooden doors, some propped open, bursting with laughter or music or video game noises. Everything smells like a movie theater.
“Popcorn dinner. What a lifestyle,” says Lili.
Tessa steps out of the elevator as soon as we pass it. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Lili arches her brows. “Too good for the stairs?”
“The himbos wore me out.” Tessa’s gaze flicks to me, cheeks going red. “Not. You know. Sexually. I’m not—I’m a lesbian. Who can’t stop talking. Apparently.” She swipes at her bangs, nudging them sideways. Now that her hair’s a little drier, it’s settled into the sort of perfectly disheveled tomboy bob I could never pull off in a million years. Not quite chin-length. I’ve always loved hair like that, though, especially when it wings out at the ends a bit, like Tessa’s does. I mean, if I were really bi, I bet I’d fall for her based on hair alone.
“Okay, Declan says he’s now a—direct quote—‘gaping wound of hunger.’” Lili looks up from her phone. “Bro, you are literally in a dining hall surrounded by food. Does he think he’s not allowed to eat until we get there?”
“We better go save him.” Tessa bumps her own fisted hands together. “Imogen, are you ready to experience culinary perfection?”
“Oh,” Lili says. “This is not that.”
Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Albertalli.
Reprinted by permission of Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. All Rights Reserved.
Imogen, Obviously, by Becky Albertalli will be released May 2, 2023. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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