September 29th is getting close, which means Love Leaves a Paper Trail is almost out. It already has five preorders, which is not a giant number in the grand machinery of publishing, but it is five actual people who saw what I was doing with this book and decided, yes, I would like to pay money for that particular problem.

This book wasn't even supposed to happen, it was a Medium series that spiraled into book length.

I’ve mentioned the book in the last couple newsletters, but mostly in the usual update sense: here’s the cover, here’s the release date, here’s the preorder link, moving on. This one is weird enough, and enough of a departure from some of the other things I’ve released lately, that I wanted to give it an actual newsletter instead of another paragraph squeezed between everything else.

Part of the weirdness is that the book is set partly in 1997, which apparently means I have now lived long enough to write historical fiction about a period I personally remember. I do not care for this development. There are AOL screen names, long-distance phone calls, handwritten letters, film that has to be developed, and an internet that was somehow both much smaller and much easier to disappear inside. That last part is where the book really started for me.

This story is personal in a way because 1997 through AOL is how I met someone who would become my ex (who I'm still good friends with). Aspects of the characters, their ages (aka the lying), their conversations, etc echo aspects of my life, and instead of what it actually became, I wrote what it could have been if life had been different. The characters are different enough from what I was, and what she was, in life, but the thoughts and emotions and buildup was still the same. reading this book you're getting to read a based on a true story version of my life, mind you, a very elaborated version.

One of the things I kept coming back to while writing this was how much of your identity online used to exist entirely because you said it did. In 1997, there wasn’t an enormous searchable pile of your life sitting behind every conversation. There was whatever you put in your AOL profile, whatever screen name you chose, what you said in a chat window, and eventually maybe a photograph if the relationship got far enough that somebody was willing to deal with film developing and postage. Most of the time, the person on the other side had no way to check the little details unless you gave them something to check.

That creates a weird kind of intimacy, because it means two opposite things can be happening at the same time. You can tell somebody things you’ve never told anyone else because they are fourteen hundred miles away and exist mostly as words on a screen, while also controlling exactly which pieces of yourself they ever get to see. You can be more honest about what you think, what you want, what scares you, what turns you on, whatever, while still being selective about the boring factual scaffolding around all of it. The person can know the inside of your head better than people who see you every day and still be wrong about something as basic as your age.

And that is where the question gets interesting to me: when does letting somebody believe something become the same thing as lying to them? If they ask your age and you give them a fake number, easy. You lied. If they ask whether you graduated and you say yes because you did, but they assume you mean college when you actually mean high school, it gets murkier. You know what they think. You know why they think it. You also know you never actually said the thing they now believe. Technically every word you gave them was true, which is exactly the sort of technicality an eighteen-year-old can turn into a complete moral philosophy if she needs it badly enough.

Obviously people still do versions of this now, because technology has changed considerably faster than human beings have. We curate profiles, choose flattering photos, leave things out, let people make assumptions we don’t particularly feel like correcting. But doing it in 1997 feels different because there were so many more blank spaces for the other person to fill in. You weren’t constructing an identity against twenty years of searchable evidence. You were constructing it almost from scratch, one sentence at a time, and the person on the other end had to decide how much of the picture they were drawing belonged to you and how much of it belonged to them.

That became the little ethical knot at the center of Love Leaves a Paper Trail before I had much of anything else. Not whether someone could invent a fake person online. We already knew that. The more interesting question was what happens when almost everything about the person is real, including the feelings, and there is just one very important thing sitting underneath all of it that the other person has gotten wrong.

That question is basically where Kristina enters the book. Rather than keep explaining it, this is the moment she makes the choice.

He asked the standard question eventually. Everyone did back then, and it wasn't sinister, it was just the handshake of the era.

BackBayPoet: So — ASL?

I typed 18/F/Kansas and my finger sat on the enter key for a long time, the cursor blinking at the end of the line, and then I backspaced through all of it, and this is the moment, so I'm not going to dress it up.

LindyKris: F, Kansas, just graduated.

BackBayPoet: Congratulations. What was your major?

I looked at that question for a while. My heart was doing something complicated, a slow squeeze followed by a flutter that I felt all the way up in my throat. He had built me an exit and a door with the same six words, and I knew, in the way you know things at eighteen that you spend years pretending you didn't know, that if I corrected him, the conversation was over. A twenty-nine-year-old man who wrote lines like the one in that profile did not keep talking to former high schoolers, and the fact that he wouldn't was, I understood even then, a point in his favor.

His decency was the obstacle.

Sit with that one. I did, for about four seconds.

LindyKris: English. Obviously.

BackBayPoet: Obviously.

I handed him true pieces and stood aside while he built the wrong woman out of them.

Forty-seven-year-old me would like to note for the record that I did not, technically, say the word college. I said graduated, which was true. I said English, which was the subject I'd have picked if the choice had been mine to make. Eighteen-year-old me filed it under technically not lying and slept fine.

It would be years before I understood that technically is the sound a lie makes when it's putting on its Sunday clothes.

That scene is basically the seed the rest of the book grew around, because I kept thinking about how differently it would play now. Today, Will could probably find Kristina's actual age in under ten minutes without even trying very hard. There would be a graduation post somewhere, a tagged photo, a school account, a birthday somebody forgot to make private. The internet has become very good at leaving fingerprints everywhere.

At the same time, that doesn't necessarily mean we're harder to fool. We've just changed the tools. Instead of building a false impression out of missing information, we build one out of too much information. We can show people hundreds of pictures and still choose every single one. We can post constantly and still leave out the parts that would change how somebody sees us. We can make ourselves look incredibly available while keeping enormous pieces of our lives completely offstage. The mechanics are different, but the basic human instinct is the same: everybody edits.

That's what kept pulling me back to Kristina. She isn't inventing an entirely fictional person. She's deciding which truths count, which truths can wait, and which assumptions she's willing to let somebody else make for her. That felt much more interesting to me than a straightforward catfishing story, because the dangerous part isn't that nothing about her is real. It's that almost everything is.

So that’s Love Leaves a Paper Trail: a 1997 age-gap romance about an eighteen-year-old in Kansas and a twenty-nine-year-old poet in Boston who meet through AOL, fall into each other through messages, letters, phone calls and the kind of long-distance intimacy that existed before everyone carried the internet in their pocket.

Nearly thirty years later, Kristina is telling that story to another eighteen-year-old woman who has also met an older man online. From far enough away, the two situations look similar enough to make Kristina deeply uncomfortable. Up close, the differences are the whole point.

The book is about how much of love is built from what people say, what they leave out, what they assume, and what they do when the version of someone in their head has to survive contact with the real person. It’s also about memory, evidence, the things people keep, and the things that disappear.

The book already has five preorders, which I’m genuinely happy about, and the first two Goodreads ratings have both come in at five stars.

Two reviews is obviously not enough data to start building charts and declaring victory, but it is enough to make release week feel a little less like throwing a book into the ocean and waiting to see whether anything floats back.

Mostly, I’m just glad the early readers seem to be getting what I was trying to do with it. This one is a little stranger than a straightforward romance, because the romance itself is only part of what the book is examining. If the first few readers are coming out the other side satisfied, I’ll take that as a very good sign.

Love Leaves a Paper Trail releases September 29th. If the setup sounds like your kind of mess, you can preorder it now. It is only available on amazon at the moment and the paperback will be available on 9/29/2026.

If you’ve already preordered it, thank you. Seriously. Every preorder helps, but more than that, it means there are already people waiting for Kristina to explain herself, which feels appropriate considering how much of this book is Kristina explaining herself.

I’m looking forward to finally getting this one out of my hands and into yours. Mostly because I’ve been sitting with these people for long enough that September 29th feels less like a release date and more like the day I finally get to introduce you properly.

— B.E. Wolf