AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book has defied every attempt to categorize it. It is not science-fiction exactly, nor is it fantasy. It’s not a satire. It’s not political, and it isn’t purely entertainment. It’s silly at times. It’s deathly serious elsewhere. It has literary aspirations, but enough nonsensical asides and bad jokes to perhaps seem more like a story told by a friend. It is admittedly bizarre. It is certainly unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere.

When I set out to write Bananas!, I wanted to capture some aspect of the millennial experience, of growing up and adjusting to adulthood in a dizzy, oft-ungrounded world. Every day, we wrangle with technologies and forces too young and too powerful to be understood. Social media remains in its infancy; we have no idea of its true power, nor its true capacity. The planet is slowly dying of heatstroke. Grand-scale existential dread exists for us just as it did for many during the Cold War, but its every knuckle twitch is now communicated live and direct and in real-time. Hell, every millennial you know has some combination of depression and anxiety and ADHD, diagnosed or not. We all stare together into an uncertain future. And that brings me to the pandemic.

Bananas! was completed in December of 2019, which makes it an innocent book, written by an innocent author. Neither of us knew about the catastrophic illness 2020 would introduce, and thus, the millennial experience as I wrote it no longer exists. Our world, and our generation, has been forever and fundamentally altered. And so, Bananas! is a kind of snapshot, dealing in psychoses and schemas that I once believed were very important, stolen from a pre-pandemic world. 

Yes, ours is a particularly odd time to live in, all times are, forever oscillating between various levels of it. No matter how odd your world is, my hope is there are things in this story which resonate with it, because they too are odd, because the story itself is odd, because above all else, this story understands how odd it is simply being alive.

And lastly, this is a story meant to be shared. If you find this story in your hands, I encourage you to share it, discuss it, gift it. It is my great honor to have entered your life in this way, and your sharing these words with others is a tribute I can hardly fathom. I love you. Oh gosh, I love you lots and lots.

If you do enjoy this story, I ask and encourage you to visit its accompanying website, www.bananasnovel.com, wherein you will find ways to support the artists, aka myself and my extremely talented graphic designer (and dear friend), Jessica Richards, who was absolutely instrumental in the creation of the work you hold before you. I am deeply in her debt, and it is important to me that you know of her before we begin. All these words, all the spaces in between…hell, the entire book, is as much a physical product of her genius as it is a mental product of my instability.

Please share. Please reach out if you like. And most of all, please enjoy. It means the entire world that you have decided to take this journey with me. I’m honored and humbled and, well, I’m flabbergasted beyond all belief. Thank you for all you’ve done for me; it is already more than you know.

Dutifully yours,

Sandy Manmittens