99 Erics

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer, activist, and biologist. She is the author of two other books, 2007's Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (which Ms. Magazine ranked #16 on their list of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time) and 2013's Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive (which was a finalist for the 2013 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction). Julia's other writings have appeared in over a dozen anthologies, in magazines and news outlets such as TIME, The Guardian, The Advocate, The Daily Beast, Bitch, AlterNet, Out, Ms., and Salon, and have been used as teaching materials in queer and gender studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and human sexuality courses across North America. As a scientist, Julia has a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Columbia University, and spent seventeen years as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fields of genetics and evolutionary-developmental biology. She also writes silly, surreal, sex-positive fiction under the pen name Kat Cataclysm, and creates music under the moniker *soft vowel sounds*. More about all her creative endeavors can be found at juliaserano.com.

Kat Cataclysm is an ethically non-monogamous bisexual woman and absurdist short fiction writer who embarks upon writing a book called 99 Erics, chronicling her experiences dating ninety-nine different people named Eric. The book is largely comprised of humorous anecdotes from Kat's dates with various Erics; satirical takes on relationships, sexual conventions, language, the writing process, book publishing, online media, and tech culture; and Kat's smart yet silly digressions on a variety of topics, including the distorted nature of memories, hipsters, sex toys, sabermetrics, YA dystopian fiction, trendy restaurants, Freudian slips, banana slug mating practices, lucid dreaming, agnosticism, the internet of things, and Prince lyrics, to name but a few. These more fanciful passages are seamlessly interwoven with more serious and mundane matters, such as navigating the world as a woman and sexual minority, being an outcast who doesn't really fit in, struggling to make ends meet, and reconciling one's past with the present. The end result is a fun and fast read that tackles meaty subjects and contemporary issues along the way.