QUANTUM GIRL THEORY

On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright red parka and disappeared from her dorm at Bennington College in Vermont. Eighteen, white, blonde, wealthy — she was never found.

Each chapter of QUANTUM GIRL THEORY imagines a life Paula Jean Welden may have lived after she left that room: in love with a woman in a Communist cell and running from her blackmailer in 1950s New York. A literary forger on the verge of discovery at the advent of the computer age. A disgraced showgirl returning home to her mother's deathbed. Is she a lobotomy victim, is she faking amnesia, is she already buried in the nearby woods?

Or is she Mary Garrett, the hard-edged clairvoyant hustling for reward money by searching for missing girls in the Jim Crow south? A trip to Elizabethtown, North Carolina, leads Mary to a twisty case that no one, not even the missing girl's mother, wants her to solve. There, Mary stumbles into an even bigger mystery: two other missing girls, both Black, whose disappearances are studiously ignored by the overbearing sheriff. Mary's got no one else to trust, and as her own past tangles with the present, it's unclear whether she can even trust herself.

“Inventive….Ryan’s novel takes up what true-crime aficionados would call the “less dead”: victims of violence or missing people from marginalized communities who fail to garner the same attention as idealized victims—namely, straight White young women. Ryan takes a meta approach here; the novel is as much about the way we mythologize this type of missing and murdered victim as it is a twisty mystery….A puzzler that is both brainy and full of satisfying narrative brawn.” —Kirkus                                         

“Intriguing…[Ryan] has a knack for clever turns of phrase and imbues her concept with smart insights on the public’s fascination with missing girls and young women.” —Publishers Weekly

“Quantum Girl Theory is a doubly impressive feat—a dark, dizzying mystery about the fate of three missing girls in 1960s North Carolina studded with a series of elegant meditations on loss, violence and identity. It stayed with me long after I put it down.”—Alexandra Andrews, author of Who Is Maud Dixon?

“Clever and imaginative, Quantum Girl Theory is a dazzling, dizzyingly fresh take on the missing person narrative, a novel full of insight into the lives of girls and women.”—Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles

OTHER WRITINGS:

“Imagining the Many Futures — And Complex Humanity — of the Archetypal Missing Girl”, Lit Hub
“7 Books About Multiple Timelines and Blurred Realities,” Electric Literature

SHORT FICTION:

“The Girl Was Already on Fire,” VQR, Summer 2021

“QUANTUM GIRL THEORY excerpt: ghost hunter,” Provincetown Arts, 2018

"Natural Hazards," Necessary Fiction, February 2018

"A Girl Is (Not) a Pirate Ship," Booth 11, Fall 2017 (and online).

"Fourth Grade Boyfriend in a Coffee Can," The Normal School, Spring 2017.

"Half-Lives of Sisters," Copper Nickel, Spring 2017.

"Fodor's Wapakoneta: Anastasia Posner's Autobiographical Museum," Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall/Winter 2015.

"Many Deaths of Paula Jean Welden," Conjunctions (Web Conjunctions), November 2014.

"16 Things That Are True," Glimmer Train, Spring/Summer 2014.

"Walking on Sunshine," A cappella Zoo (winner of Apospecimen Award), Fall 2013.