"Just Want You Here"

Meredith Turits is a writer and an editor.

She specializes in business, economics, sports, and literature (but she’s written about and edited nearly everything). Currently, she is the editorial director, features at Front Office Sports.

Turits is the former editor of business features at BBC.com. Prior, she was a founding editor of Bustle, where she launched and ran books coverage, and has held other senior strategic editorial roles at both startup and legacy media companies.

The newly released Just Want You Here is her debut novel.

Turits is a magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University, and attended the Yale Writer’s Workshop for fiction. She lives and writes in Connecticut, and has more useless sports knowledge in her brain than you can possibly imagine.

Turits applied the Page 69 Test to Just Want You Here and reported the following:

From page 69:

Ari feels trampled by his frigidity. He’s been distant all week, but she’s chalked it up to how busy he is, how there’s no way he could possibly talk about them here. Yet there’s something about the staccato of his voice that makes her feel like he’s closed the book on them, even if he’d barely cracked it at all.

In this passage, my main character Ari has a conversation with her boss, Wells, after they've slept together once. He has a conversation with her at the office that feels too normal for her after what they've done, and her brain is scrambled by it. She doesn't know if their relationship will go forward or not.

The underlying emotion in this paragraph is about desire and confusion, looking for signs and signals to know what's right and what's next. In that regard, it's a good litmus test for the overall tenor of the book, which is all about the emotional journey of forging your path after the one you counted on swerves. In another sense, however, Ari and Wells's affair ramps up quickly and this is the only point at which she questions whether something will happen, which doesn't reflect their relationship throughout the book. But overall, I'd say this does a good job of reflecting the book and its prose.

In general, Just Want You Here has plenty of plot, including twists and turns, but it's overall a book about relationships and desire and the emotional journey people go on to navigate them. There's a lot of interiority from the four main characters, and I really wanted that to shine as you navigate growth and regression with them. Passages like this, even though they're just moments in time, are indicative of what I hoped to do on the page, which was bring readers as close to my characters as possible.

Visit Meredith Turits's website.

--Marshal Zeringue