What We Give, What We Take

In 1967, Fay Stonewell, a water tank escape artist in Florida, leaves for Vietnam to join the Amazing Humans, a jerry-rigged carnival entertaining the troops, abandoning her teenage, disabled son, Dickie, in the care of an abusive boyfriend.

Now forty-years-old, Dickie recalls the chaotic months after Fay left. His troubled home life ends in a surprising act of violence, forcing him to run away first to Manhattan, where he’s taken in by the eccentric artist Laurence Jones and later, by Spin, a gay man struggling with AIDS in a Massachusetts coastal town. Spin may offer Dickie what he’s always wanted: a home without wheels. But the farther Dickie runs, the tighter the past clings to him.

Fay faces dangerous threats also. From the night her plane jolts onto a darkened Saigon runway, she confronts every bad decision she’s made as she struggles to return to her son. But the Humans owner is hellbent on keeping her in Vietnam, performing only for war-injured children at a hospital, daily reminders of the son she’s left behind.

Ultimately, What We Give, What We Take is a deeply moving story of second chances and rising above family circumstances, however dysfunctional they may be.

Author: Randi Triant

Pub Date: April 12th, 2022

Categories: Fiction, Spring 2022

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About The Author

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2023 IPPY Awards Gold Medalist in LGBTQ+ Fiction
2022 Foreword INDIES Finalist in LGBTQ+ (Adult Fiction)

“Those who expect a feel-good novel to come from all this will be disappointed. But they will be captured by very good writing and wonderful portraits of Fay and Dickie. . . . A very fine novel about a mother’s love and a son’s survival.”
—Kirkus Reviews“At once tender, cruel, sensitive, and raw, What We Give, What We Take is a searing novel in which wounded people make hard decisions in order to survive.”
—Foreword Reviews “What We Give, What We Take is the indelible portrait of a mother and son eking out lives on the periphery, first together, then apart. With a tenderness for life’s misfits that recalls Carson McCullers, Randi Triant, in this remarkable novel, hauntingly evokes Fay’s and Dickie’s complexities, and those of the men and women who exploit, brutalize, nurture, and adore them.”
—Claire Messud, author of the national bestselling novels, The Woman Upstairs and The Emperor’s Children

“A haunting novel about people driven by longings beyond the boundaries of everyday life. Randi Triant tells a story that shimmers with surprises and insights about a world that’s tilted towards unconventional answers to universal questions about love and desire. Her characters’ problems are revealed with pain and humor that deliver transformations we cannot reject but that we feel are our very own. Rapid and unblinking, it’s unforgettable.”
—Maria Flook, Author of New York Times Best Seller Invisible Eden

About The Author

Randi Triant is the author of the novels The Treehouse, selected as an AfterEllen.com ultimate summer read, and A New Life. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and magazines, including two anthologies of writing about HIV/AIDS, Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A & U and Fingernails Across the Blackboard:Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. She lives in Massachusetts.