In the world lovers create for themselves, it’s the simple images and quiet gestures that linger in memory. A silent moment together on a bench, a hand loose upon a table, a voice carried across a crowded room.
Doug is quiet and aimless when he meets Sophie, an extravagant, excitable artist. They live together on box wine, ramen and peanut butter until their world is fractured by violence. Eight years later, they rediscover each other as Sophie approaches a startling decision.
Cloud Diary is Doug’s story about Sophie and the shattering, transformative nature of intimacy. In considering the ways our histories can both scar and rescue us, it reminds us that the past is never simply the past.
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Reviews
“At its great and generous heart, Cloud Diary, then, is a turn of the new millennium love story…Mitchell creates a love story at once engaging and unnervingly immediate. What stuns here is the unforced elegance of Mitchell’s anatomy of love, his willingness to use language unironically to capture that mysterious kinetic.”
-Joseph Dewey, North Carolina Literary Review
“A delightful and accomplished novel. Cloud Diary is a winning blend of metaphysics and box wine, of sticky-floored dive bars and lofty artistic passions. Steve Mitchell renders love and mortality with precision and without sentimentality. Nuanced and compassionate, Cloud Diary is a tribute to the ever presence of the past, and how it might help us become whole.”
-Michael Parker, The Watery Part of the World, Everything Then and Since
“The fluidity in which Mitchell moves between past and present, keeping clear sight on perspective and the overarching vision of the story, each line sings with simplicity, while working with an enigmatic, layered duality, unearthing the buried life of these characters with each sentence.”
-Spencer Brown, Triad City Beat
“With his spare, delicate sentences and poignant observations, Steve Mitchell takes us deep into his characters, and, in turn, into ourselves—into our own past loves and romantic longings. This story of Doug and Sophie is more than just the experience of being in love—it’s about the deep roots and long tendrils that love can leave for all of us. Cloud Diary is a powerful story that is both beautifully crafted and deeply felt. Holy fuck, I love this book so.”
-Frances Badgett, Contrary Magazine
As the story moves into more sobering times, Mitchell deftly deals with Doug’s memories, revealing them not chronologically but as memories really do work their way into our consciousness — as flashes, images, triggered by odd things at odd moments, and eventually spinning into the stories we tell ourselves, even if they are not always exactly the way things happened.
-Linda Brinson, Greensboro News and Record
“A beautiful, bittersweet novel about first love—how it forms us, how it settles in us and lingers, consoling us even to the end of our days.”
-Kim Church, Byrd