Ugh. Anyway… is a sharp, funny, deeply relatable memoir about dating, ambition, and the long road to self-acceptance.
Set against the backdrop of New York City dating culture — from flip phones and phone numbers written on cocktail napkins to the emotional whiplash of dating apps — E.M. Gallagher traces the relationships that shaped her twenties and thirties, and the reckoning that followed as she entered her forties. These personal essays explore modern dating, heartbreak, and intimacy, but this is not a book about bad dates.
This is a book about waking up inside your own life and realizing something is off. About what happens when you keep choosing chemistry over clarity, potential over reality, and being chosen over choosing yourself. About navigating relationships while quietly struggling in a career that looks successful from the outside but feels wrong on the inside. About the low-grade anxiety of realizing you may have built a life that you no longer recognize yourself in, and the courage it takes to change course.
With humor, grit, honesty, and a voice that feels like your smartest friend telling the truth over a drink, Ugh. Anyway… blends memoir and essay to examine love, career, and the nonlinear process of becoming a woman who trusts herself. This is a book for millennial women entering midlife, for anyone who has dated in a city like New York, and for readers drawn to intimate, voice-driven nonfiction.
There is no fairy-tale ending here. There is something better, and it begins with clarity, agency, and choosing yourself.
Praise for Ugh. Anyway...“Written with playful irreverence, emotional intelligence, and a voice that crackles off the page, E.M. Gallagher delivers a memoir that feels fully alive from the jump. Smart, fearless, and funny in the way only someone telling the unabashed truth can be.
Set in early-aughts New York City, before vulnerability was currency and irony was survival, this book captures the emotional mechanics of dating in a culture that prized "cool" above all else. Gallagher writes like your sharpest, most self-aware friend. It’s the point in the night when the eyeliner has smeared and everyone finally gets REAL.
What makes this book sparkle is the voice. It's distinct; the kind of voice you could clock in a loud, rowdy, bar on the Lower East Side on a Friday night. Gallagher knows exactly when to hold back and when to let the truth artfully slip through the cracks. This is not a collection of dating stories. It’s a memoir about becoming yourself in real time.
Think the dating misadventures of Sex and the City, collided with the raw, unfiltered, painfully true mirror-holding of Girls. Add the unpretentious, wickedly funny voiceiness of Samantha Irby. The result is something unmistakably and unequivocally E.M. Gallagher. Funny because it hurts. Honest because it has to be.”
— Zara Barrie, Girl Stop Passing Out in Your Makeup
"Anyone who has been in the dating pool long enough knows the drill. You find yourself drowning in hope, chemistry, and red flags too exciting to ignore, until you finally realize you're not choosing people anymore, you're choosing your own patterns. Ugh, Anyway... is funny, honest, and deeply relatable. E.M. writes about love and heartbreak, but the true baseline of this story is about a woman learning who she is, what she wants, and how she finally stops outsourcing her sense of authenticity through men and starts choosing herself, one messy step at a time. This book is a reminder that becoming yourself isn't always graceful—but it is always worth it."
— Cara Alwill, Bestselling Author + Founder of Pink Ink Press
