Red Hen Press · October 6, 2026
Desire Lines
Print · E-book · Audiobook narrated by the author
- ★ Starred review — Shelf Awareness
- A most anticipated feminist book of 2026 — Ms. Magazine
- Exclusive cover reveal — PEOPLE
★Shelf Awareness · Starred Review
“As she gazes through the clarifying lenses of midlife, motherhood, and a loving marriage to make peace with her past, Young provides an intellectually courageous road map for readers reconciling the cracks in their own family narratives.
Embedded with gems from other feminist icons, Desire Lines is the graceful work of a writer triumphantly exerting her right, “like a goddess,” to bask in her “own radiance.””
—Shahina Piyarali in a starred review
Seattle Magazine · September 2026
“…an unflinching look at the challenge of balancing one’s own desires with the demands of motherhood, marriage, and work, and the lengths creative women will go to produce their art… Desire Lines is a potent feminist text.”
Pleiades: Literature in Context · In conversation
“These essays are a liberation, too, then. They are a confrontation, a reckoning and a revelation. They are an invitation from Millares Young and from a full choir of feminist writers and thinkers whose words interweave her own throughout the book, to refuse diminishment and erasure.”
—Beth Ward in a conversation for Pleiades
PEOPLE · Exclusive cover reveal
“Had I known I would write a memoir, I might not have allowed myself to become a writer. I spent 20 years making sure other people’s stories were heard. Current circumstances forced me to get personal. With Desire Lines, I hope to show the beauty and freedom we make possible when we refuse to abandon our truths.”
—Kristen Millares Young, in an exclusive cover reveal and interview for PEOPLE
Havana Times · In conversation
“A desire line is proof that people choose against the path that was planned for them. What moves me is that it’s collective. We may feel alone out there. We’re not. …
I want people to stop reading their own deviations as personal failures. If they are that, it is only of obedience. A desire line is evidence: You have company. We may feel alone on our journeys, but we are not alone.”
—Yours truly, in a conversation with Selena Mercuri for Havana Times
Cover Art by Anna Madruga of Red Hen Press
Desire Lines
Desire Lines is a forensic investigation into the emotional topography of being a woman, a writer and a mother. In my debut memoir, I seek possibilities for women’s liberation amid the ongoing erosion of our human rights. Desire Lines excavates submerged truths about motherhood, the body and the sacred.
Desire Lines takes its title from footpaths—of necessity, defiance and longing—that emerge next to the routes that were planned for us. Challenging myself to be a mother unlike what I have known, I center my own body as a site of resistance and making.
Tracing my matrilineage from Cuba to Spain, I uncovered the remnants of a pagan cult whose mother goddess, Cybele, was erased to make way for the Virgin Mary. But Cybele was no virgin.
On the edge of an impasse, written as both invitation and veil, Desire Lines reclaims the power siphoned from women’s stories, wielding the lyric essay for awakening consciousness.
In the press
“As a girl, I was taught to fear my own story. As a woman, I know better. Revelations await beneath the lies we are told about ourselves and the icons we worship. This book holds the light I was hiding from myself.”
—PEOPLE Magazine interview
Advance praise
“In Desire Lines, Kristen Millares Young explores womanhood, human rights, and identity with a moral imperative and artistry that few writers achieve. She is an immense literary talent, and this remarkable book should be read by all.”
author of The Devil is a Southpaw, The Removed
and Where the Dead Sit Talking
“These emotionally gripping essays delve into the complexities of familial love and obligation. Kristen Millares Young seamlessly weaves together personal experience, historical research, mythology, and cultural critique in a memoir that feels both timely and timeless. Her prose is alive with style and poetic lyricism.”
author of Chemistry and Joan Is Okay
“Kristen Millares Young brings a searching, generous, and unrelenting gaze to every subject she writes on, most of all herself.”
author of Girlhood and The Dry Season
“In this tremendous memoir, Kristen Millares Young grips the reader’s hand and leads us into the terrifying place where all life comes from. She is intrepid, incisive. Generous and unsparing is her consideration of mothering, the ordinary and glorious act that keeps the world renewing itself. I loved this book.”
author of White Magic and My Body Is a Book of Rules
“Kristen Millares Young is a fearless woman who will go places other writers might fear to tread. I have admired her fierce honesty and craft for a long time and am thrilled to have this explosive and daring memoir in my hands. More, please.”
author of The Devil’s Highway
“Kristen Millares Young’s memoir Desire Lines is a sage instruction manual for how to choose love over harm, joy over despair, art over ruin. Strength and affection shine from every page. In a patriarchal world that seeks to break us, this is a defiant and triumphant howl of wholeness, both electrifying and healing.”
author of The Cassandra
