Thursday's Geoff Rickly to release his debut novel this year
Geoff Rickly, the incendiary vocalist behind Thursday, No Devotion, and United Nations, has a new novel on the way this summer.
Someone Who Isn’t Me will act as a fictionalized version of his time at an ibogaine clinic — a drug treatment center that specializes in using the psychedelic compound to help opioid dependence — in Mexico. Called a “feverish journey,” the debut novel will follow his experience visiting the center to face his heroin addiction — and eventually confront the darkest parts of his psyche as a form of survival.
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The book has already earned praise from My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way (who called it a “spiral staircase in a burning building”), author Hanif Abdurraqib, and filmmaker David Gordon Green, among others.
Rickly, of course, has channeled the book’s themes into his music, most recently with his other project No Devotion. The band released their second album, No Oblivion, last year, which he said was his first time making music sober.
“I had to lean on [the band] quite a bit because suddenly, there were so many raw feelings,” he explains. “You think that the more emotional a performance, the better, but that’s a myth. You have to have the emotion in there and subdue it enough to perform a technical or communicative vocal. You have to be in touch with that emotion without actually retraumatizing someone, and I think that was a hard one for me to figure out with this record because I was raw and didn’t have a crutch to lean on.”
Someone Who Isn’t Me is out July 25 via Rose Books, and you can preorder your copy here. Check out the cover art by Jesse Draxler below.
