Someone Who Isn’t Me
The debut novel
by Geoff Rickly
Rose Books #001
July 25, 2023
Cover image by Jesse Draxler
Cover design by Jesse Reed
Interior design by Adam Robinson
Photo by Liza de Guia
About the Book
Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. When Geoff hears that a drug called ibogaine might be able to save him from his heroin addiction, he goes to a clinic in Mexico to confront the darkest and most destructive versions of himself. In this modern reimagining of the Divine Comedy, survival lurks in the darkest corners of Geoff’s brain, asking, will he make it? Can anyone?
About the Author
Geoff Rickly is the lead singer and songwriter of Thursday and No Devotion. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and this is his first book.
Advance Praise for Someone Who Isn’t Me
“A spiral staircase in a burning building.”
—Gerard Way, My Chemical Romance
“Someone Who Isn't Me is a massive, blaring achievement—a seamless rendering of what it is to be dissected, to answer for the impulses, dreams, and wishes of your several past selves. This book is simultaneously generously populated and deeply intimate, a tight needle to thread, though it is done beautifully.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
“A front-row seat to a feedback drenched lifestyle. Rickly blows up every rock star cliche and creates something indelible from the ashes. Redefining what it means to be a human being under both the pressures and inspirations of performance. It conjures an intimate interior of challenges within the epic dream-come-true backdrop.”
—David Gordon Green, Director
“Someone Who Isn’t Me is a special kind of contraband. In this hallucinatory debut, Geoff Rickly explores the dazzling and tragic allure of hard drugs. Rickly takes us on a spikey journey through the human psyche of a man who knows the world intimately, but no longer recognises himself in it. An outstanding debut, thrilling, fierce and hallucinatory. A book to shake your soul out.”
—Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
“Sending currents of deep, humane wit through its vortices of imagination, Someone Who Isn’t Me is a wild, hypnotic ride that makes a lasting music of the holy and the diabolical. An incandescent debut. I think it rewired my neural pathways.”
—Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue
“This is the most compelling piece of writing I’ve read in a long time—bizarre, beautiful, mind-bending, and indelible. Every element in this book is wildly inventive and impactful, from its rollercoaster plot to the stripped-bare vulnerability. Rickly has written a new classic.”
—Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac
“The modern literary novel is often a vapid fantasy, the author’s best guess as to what a lived life feels like. Someone Who Isn’t Me is the opposite. This is honey spilled on sandpaper. The pages are blistered and stained and tactile and true, they reek, they weep, they vomit, they scream. This book is a gift and a warning, an effigy for the living: Rickly performed an autopsy on himself and these are the coroner’s notes.”
—Sam Tallent, author of Running the Light
“Raw nerve, live wire, blisteringly psychoactive. This novel will set your mind racing, kick your heart into highest gear.” —Bud Smith, author of Teenager
“A seasick, lyrical book. Take a ride with this gorgeous mind—there’s no other like it, except your own. This work is a poetic and hard-won example of how we can grow up.”
—Amy Rose Spiegel, author of Action: A Book About Sex
Press for Someone Who Isn’t Me
Anti-Matter: In Conversation: Geoff Rickly
“If the real Geoff Rickly feels for his fictional self, it's because he's been there.”
Barrelhouse: Barrelhouse Reviews: Someone Who Isn’t Me by Geoff Rickly
"Rickly reminds readers that addiction recovery has its own language of beauty and pain. When you wake from numbness, you see anew.”
Black Lipstick: Crisis of Character: Catherine Spino Reviews Geoff Rickly’s Someone Who Isn’t Me
“I wanted the voices to stop but the only duct tape I knew would quiet them was booze and weed. But my desire for sobriety was stronger, so I buckled in and braced myself. Geoff hears cicadas as the ibogaine kicks in.”
Brooklyn Vegan: Thursday's Geoff Rickly Announces Debut Novel
Chorus.FM: Review: Someone Who Isn’t Me by Geoff Rickly
“As great of a lead singer and lyricist Geoff Rickly is, he is arguably a more talented writer on this loosely-based work of fiction that feels as raw as its likely intended to be.”
The Creative Independent: Geoff Rickly on the Benefits of an Interdisciplinary Practice
Writer and musician Geoff Rickly discusses the porous boundaries between autobiography and fiction, literature and music, and our past and present selves.
DIRT: Invisible Architecture: The Fictionalized Drug Trip
“Within Someone Who Isn’t Me, time and interiority have their own structures, and Rickly’s interest in the built environment jumps off the page.”
GQ: How Thursday Frontman Geoff Rickly Wrote This Summer’s Trippiest Drug Novel—While Sober
“The book is a whirlwind read, part addiction autofiction, part band memoir, part psychedelic phantasmagoria.”
Hobart: William Burroughs and Sheila Heti on a Post-Hardcore Tour Bus, Dante as Tour Manager, Italo Calvino the Support Band: A Review of Geoff Rickly’s Debut Novel ‘Someone Who Isn’t Me’
“I’ve been thinking about how Rickly worked on his novel for five hours a day, five days a week, for five years – thinking how good that sounds. It makes me want to slow down and not try to get ahead of myself.”
Inside Hook: The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This July
“The novel follows a character struggling with his own demons — and reckoning with the paradise, purgatory and hell lurking in one man’s mind.”
Kerrang!: Book Review: Geoff Rickly - Someone Who Isn’t Me
“You become the junk that’s been flowing through his veins, you become the ibogaine, you become Geoff’s subconscious and conscious selves – and everything in between.”
New Noise Magazine: Book Review: Geoff Rickly - Someone Who Isn’t Me
“Remarkably, Rickly has an exact function for each and every word he writes. Not a single syllable is wasted, as his lyrical background translates beautifully to his prose.”
NPR: In 'Someone Who Isn't Me,' Geoff Rickly recounts the struggles of some other singer
“It's rightly considered a classic of its era, and it crystallized Rickly as — no hyperbole, just fact — one of the most poetic, impactful and inspirational voices of his generation.”
Otherppl Podcast: Episode 854. Geoff Rickly
Pitchfork: Thursday’s Geoff Rickly Announces New Book ‘Someone Who Isn’t Me’
Rocksound: Interview: Thursday’s Geoff Rickly Talks Debut Novel ‘Someone Who Isn’t Me’
“‘Someone Who Isn’t Me’ is a painstaking labour of love, a complete reimagining of the trip novel by way of Dante’s Divine Comedy.”
The Spectrum: A Book Review: ‘Someone Who Isn’t Me’ by Geoff Rickly
“I’ll be honest: I was hooked on this book just from the summary, but when you give me the chance to cross-reference “Howl” on page five, in addition to the visceral emotions the first paragraph alone summoned at seven o’clock in the morning? Well. Let’s just say I’m already on my third re-read and I haven’t even had it for two weeks.”
Stereogum: We’ve Got A File On You: Geoff Rickly
“The journey is riveting as he faces trauma head-on, almost time-traveling as he’s plucked into old memories like he’s reliving those moments. The book captures the same intensity that his music burns with.”
Talkhouse: Geoff Rickly (Thursday) Talks with Jonah Bayer on the Talkhouse Podcast
“We’ve got two guys who’ve known each other for decades, and who have a popular podcast, a post-hardcore band, and a new novel between them.”
UPROXX: Thursday’s Geoff Rickly Announces His Debut Novel ‘Someone Who Isn’t Me’ Arriving This Summer
“After studying the classics in college and writing hard-hitting lyrics in bands for years, he’s publishing his debut novel.”
Variety: Geoff Rickly on Why He Wrote His Debut Book About Kicking Heroin and if Thursday Will Record New Music
“Rickly’s newest project is a novel with plenty of grounding in the real world.”