TO BE PUBLISHED
THE SHAPE I TOOK: A Memoir by Matthew Chuprin
In 1970s rural Australia, silence is survival—and anything soft must be hidden. Matthew Chuprin grows up learning how to disappear: watching from the edges, folding himself into someone easier to understand.
But beneath the surface, something restless stirs. A friendship with a sharp-eyed girl offers rare safety. A glance from a boy sparks questions too dangerous to ask. As Matthew navigates schoolyards, family secrets, and shifting bodies, he begins to sense a truth he can’t yet name—and a self he’s never been allowed to imagine.
Told in piercing, poetic prose, The Shape I Took is a queer coming-of-age memoir about the quiet ache of growing up different, and the beauty of becoming whole on your own terms.
For fans of Maggie Nelson, Edmund White, and Bryan Washington.
NEXT BOOK
ONLY THE WIND: A Journey Across a Broken Century
I’m deep into writing my second book—a historical novel based on my grandmother’s escape from Soviet Russia.
In a century torn by ideology and war, Margarete Wiens is swept from the wide plains of southern Russia to the far edges of the world, carrying with her only the fragile hope that silence might keep her family safe. Through years of flight and unchosen exile, she becomes clerk, mother, survivor—each name another border crossed, another self remade. Told in spare, luminous prose, Only the Wind: A Journey Across a Broken Century will be an elegy for the displaced, tracing how history lives on in the quiet endurance of those the world forgets.
Matthew Chuprin 