A Cigarette Lit Backwards A Novel

Set in the punk-rock scene of the early 2000s and vibrating with the intense ache of bad choices and deep longing, A Cigarette Lit Backwardsis a needle-sharp portrait of a young woman and how far she’ll go to find acceptance.

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Kat is dying to be accepted by the North Carolina punks; she is totally desperate to seem cool. At a punk show, she ends up backstage with a rock star and gets noticed by a photojournalist. And then—a dream come true for Kat—her reputation as a groupie icon skyrockets. But to maintain this notoriety, Kat makes a series of devastating choices, and soon enough, she becomes unrecognizable to herself and others.

A Cigarette Lit Backwards is a sometimes funny, often brutally honest novel about ambition and self-discovery and how a world of glamour and cool exerts its bold and breathless pull. In prose that seduces, glitters, and exhilarates, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic has written a novel that is both a wild party and a somber reckoning, consolidating her status as a thrilling and essential new voice for our time.

“A perfect coming-of-age story—with a perfect soundtrack—that walks the fragile in-between of finding out who you are and trying not to let other people decide for you. Welcome to the party room.” —Brendan Jay Sullivan, author of Rivington was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives

Tea Hacic-Vlahovic is a Croatian American writer based in Los Angeles and author of the novel Life of the Party. Previously a columnist for Vice and Wired Italy and contributing editor of Wonderland magazine, she’s the society columnist for Spike art magazine and contributes to Columbia Journal, Dazed, Autre, and others. She is the host of the Troie Radicali podcast and the founder of Stai Zitta magazine. A Cigarette Lit Backwards is her second novel.