Aging – Write on the World

In today’s author interview, Meg Howrey discusses Body Language, her latest novel about Alzheimer’s, caregiving, family conflict, and the difficult question of how we honor a person’s wishes when they can no longer make decisions for themselves.

When I finished Body Language, I found myself thinking about it long after I’d put the book down—not because it offers an easy answer to the difficult questions at its center, but because it refuses to. Howrey’s novel asks what it means to honor someone’s autonomy while also forcing us to consider the very real emotional, financial, and practical costs that can fall on the people left to provide care.

Meg Howrey is the author of Body Language, which released September 1, 2026.

What I especially appreciated about the novel was the way Howrey lets each of the three sisters—Sloane, Laurel, and Nanette—have a legitimate perspective. None of them is simply the voice of reason while the others are being selfish or misguided. Their feelings about their mother’s wishes are tangled up with their own histories, fears, relationships, and ideas about what they can realistically take on. And somehow, despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Body Language is also genuinely funny in places.

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Body Language by Meg Howrey is a deeply thoughtful and surprisingly funny literary novel about three sisters forced to confront their mother’s wishes, their own differences, and the difficult question of what it means to honor someone’s autonomy when they can no longer make decisions for themselves. The novel releases September 1, 2026.

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Body Language is a great literary novel—profound, evocative, and layered—but perhaps more importantly, it is a readable literary novel. There is a difference. Literary fiction can sometimes become so enamored with its own language and philosophical underpinnings that reading it begins to feel like work. Meg Howrey avoids that trap. Her prose is clear, concise, intelligent, and often very funny, while still giving the story the depth and complexity I want from a literary novel. In my opinion, clarity is one of the major requirements of a good novel, and Howrey demonstrates just how much can be accomplished without burying a story beneath unnecessarily elaborate language.