Meet Phoebe Berman: despite being a hopeless romantic, she’s about to be a thirty-year-old virgin. With one month before her milestone birthday, she’s determined to finally lose it . . . if her own anxiety doesn’t slow her down. The can’t-miss debut novel from podcaster and comedian Brooke Averick.
The first edition hardcover of Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It features beautiful designed endpapers and a foil-stamped case!
“I laughed (a lot), I cried (more than expected), I swooned (the perfect amount), and I looked into the metaphorical camera, wondering if this book was actually about me.”—Lyla Sage, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Soul Searching and the Rebel Blue Ranch series
Is it possible to find true love when going on a date makes you want to throw up?
Phoebe Berman fears the one thing she wants the most: love. Thanks to an extremely unfortunate first kiss attempt, crippling intimacy anxiety has plagued her since she was a teen.
Phoebe has so much going for her: a dream teaching job, a supportive and hilarious group of best friends, and all the romance novels a girl could want at her fingertips—but she can’t help but beat herself up over the one thing she can’t quite seem to figure out. Determined to change this, she drafts up the ultimate “Guide to Losing My Virginity” checklist with the hope of finally getting laid.
Suddenly, she goes from a relatively boring (basically non-existent) dating life to juggling three romantic prospects at once. There’s the gorgeous new fourth grade teacher at her school, a former high school classmate that resurfaces through Words with Friends, and there will always be her roommate, who might just be the best friends-to-lovers situation of her dreams.
Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It is a brutally honest and completely relatable story for anyone who’s ever felt stuck between coming of age and coming apart.
Release date:
May 26, 2026
Publisher:
Crown
Print pages:
304
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“You know if you keep saying you’re going to kill yourself, I’ll have to conduct a formal risk assessment, right?”
I’ve been making a conscious effort to stop, but sometimes the words just slip out. I put my hands out in front of me, an admission of guilt.
“I know, I really am trying to quit. I just can’t think of another way to communicate how dire the situation has become.”
After my four years of therapy with Sandy, she’s gotten pretty good at figuring out how to talk me off a ledge. Make one of your lists, Phoebe. Practice your deep breathing, Phoebe. Hold an ice cube in your palm until it melts, Phoebe.
But not this time. This time, there aren’t enough ice cubes in the world.
I take a deep breath, inhaling the ashy remnants of the sage that Sandy used to cleanse the room before our session, and hand her the letter I received this morning.
“Read it and weep,” I tell her, sinking back into the floral upholstery of the couch. When I saw the beat-up edges of the envelope addressed to me in my own teenage handwriting, I knew exactly what was inside.
And I wanted to light it on fire.
Sandy’s mismatched gold and silver bangles jingle as she unfolds the letter, a single piece of lined paper with a torn left edge. I close my eyes, conjuring up the image of the Twilight-themed notebook I ripped the page out of all those years ago. It was from the Moleskine of a Killer collection, and the iridescent cover would sparkle when it was exposed to direct sunlight. It has, unfortunately, been discontinued.
It doesn’t take Sandy very long to read the letter. It’s only two sentences, after all.
“What am I looking at here, Phoebe?” she asks.
I take the letter back from her, mesmerized again by the seven words scribbled across the page. My handwriting was more girlish back then, much rounder and loopier, but it’s undeniably mine. The paper has yellowed and wrinkled with age, but the message written in bold black Sharpie is as prominent as ever:
Lose your virginity. That’s all I ask.
—PB
“This was a letter I wrote to my future self when I was eighteen,” I start to explain. “It was our final assignment for twelfth-grade English before graduation: to write a list of goals we hoped to accomplish by the time we turn thirty. We stuffed them into envelopes, wrote our names on them, and handed them in to our teacher, who promised they would make it to us by our thirtieth birthdays.”
Sandys nods slowly.
“That was the only thing I wrote.”
I had started to panic when I realized I would be the only one of my friends heading into college a virgin. Not because eighteen felt like it was too old to be a virgin, but because I was still the same exact girl who’d thrown up on Lucas Johnson. Very little had changed since that moment. I had finally stomached my first kiss, but only because it was during a game of spin the bottle and I had no time to panic before Joshua Cohen’s chapped lips were on mine. I tried kissing a few more boys, boys I liked more than Joshua, but every time I got close, I would run away the second I felt my palms start to sweat. I spent my entire adolescence caught up in fantasies of romance and boyfriends, but when it came to real life, eighteen was the age when I started to think that maybe it would never actually happen for me.
And that’s why when Mrs. Friedman gave us that assignment, I had only one thing on my mind. Lose your virginity.
I never forgot about the letter, but I became hopeful that it wouldn’t find its way to me. Maybe if it never arrived, I could pretend it never existed. Except, despite a decade passing and close to three thousand miles between us, it showed up at my dining room table exactly thirty days before my thirtieth birthday.
I fold the letter in half and tuck it back in my pocket, needing it out of my sight.
Sandy begins to offer her thoughts, but I interject.
“One month, Sandy. I have exactly thirty days left to lose my virginity. That’s it.”
She shakes her head. “The only thing this letter tells me, Phoebe, is that you’ve always been hard on yourself.”
“Well, now doesn’t exactly feel like the time to start going easy on myself,” I say, blinking away tears. “Does it?”
The crease between Sandy’s eyebrows, paired with the incessant drumming of her pen on her legal notepad, tells me everything. There’s nothing she can say to put my mind at ease, and she knows it. But that never stops her from trying.
“There’s nothing wrong with being a virgin, Phoebe.” This is how it always starts. The same conversation we’ve been having for years. My brain switches to autopilot while I recite what’s become my mantra.
“I know that. But I want to fall in love, Sandy. And I want to be loved. All I’ve ever hoped for is a whirlwind romance, and that requires the ability to be physical with someone without making myself sick. So sure, there’s nothing wrong with being a virgin, but there’s something wrong with me being a virgin.”
“Well,” she starts. “Remember how we talked about doing things while scared? It might be time to start thinking about—”
“I can’t do things scared, Sandy.” My voice comes out shaky. “Not when my version of being scared means losing all control. I can’t willingly subject myself to that, and I especially can’t let it happen in front of someone else. Or on someone else. What happened in the auditorium can never happen again.”
“You can’t be sure it’ll happen again if you don’t push yourself to try,” she argues.
“I have tried. There’s something wrong with me.”
“You have to stop saying that,” Sandy says with a sigh, shaking her head sympathetically.
“Okay.” I shrug. “But I’ll still be thinking it.”
I let my mind wander to past kisses I could never let get too far and the one date I wanted so desperately to go on but never made it.
For insurance purposes, Sandy qualifies my condition as panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder, but she insists I ignore those labels. Instead, she likes to frame my particular brand of anxiety as a phobia. Like the way some people panic at the thought of getting on an airplane. Or have a debilitating fear of heights. Only in my case, I have a phobia of intimacy. She prefers to look at it this way because “people get over phobias all the time.”
But I disagree with her. Because no one with a phobia is this desperate for the one thing that they’re most afraid of. Emetophobes don’t want to throw up; germaphobes don’t yearn to be sneezed on. But I want to have sex. I want to go on dates and be swept off my feet and run through the airport hysterically while begging the star-crossed love of my life not to get on the plane. Whatever I have feels more like a curse than a phobia.
And the closer I get to thirty, the more it feels like all these things aren’t going to happen for me. It’s starting to feel like I’m running out of time.
Sandy narrows her gaze and leans back in her chair. “Could these big feelings have anything to do with Jamie getting married?”
I fiddle with a hole in the bottom of my faded Queen graphic tee. It was a hand-me-down from my dad, a security blanket in T-shirt form, and I’ll keep wearing it until the day it’s nothing but one loose thread. It felt more than necessary to put it on after opening the letter this morning.
I look down at Sandy’s Birkenstocks and bare toes as I mutter, “Probably,” when what I mean is Yes, definitely. My twenty-two-year-old sister marrying her high school sweetheart while I need to start thinking about potentially freezing my eggs is not helping the situation.
I sink back into the couch, my eyes watering from the cat hair that clings to the fabric. At the reminder of Barbara, I offer a tiny wave to the corner of the room, where Sandy’s orange tabby lounges on the windowsill. She glares back at me.
“Tell you what,” Sandy says while clapping her hands together, bangles clanging. “Let’s flip Mrs. Friedman’s assignment on its head.”
She scribbles something on her legal pad, tears the page off, and hands it to me. PHOEBE’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS is written at the top in Sandy’s all-caps chicken scratch. I let out a groan.
“You have so much to be proud of, Phoebe. I want you to take the week off from beating yourself up. Instead of focusing on the one thing you haven’t gotten to, I want you to focus on all the things you have accomplished since you wrote that letter to yourself.”
I make a conscious effort not to roll my eyes but still find myself eagerly snatching the paper out of her hand.
“You know I’ve never turned down an opportunity to make a list,” I admit.
Along with rearranging my T-shirt collection, making lists has always been one of my greatest sources of comfort.
“But I’m not using this.”
I try to hide my horrified expression as I examine Sandy’s crooked handwriting on the unsightly yellow lined paper. I dangle the sheet in between us like it’s a used tissue.
“I have my own supplies.”
I gesture to the tote bag at my feet, a gift from last year’s class, and catch myself smiling at the teacher phoebe embroidered in red thread on the front. Inside the bag I have my label maker, paper, gel pens, colored pencils, and markers. Everything that comes in handy when the time comes to make a good old-fashioned list.
Sandy accepts her paper back graciously.
“Great. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”
Her eyes dart to the cat-shaped clock hanging by the door as she makes a dramatic display of cracking her knuckles. Our time is up.
“Will I see you before the wedding?” she asks.
I swallow my annoyance, knowing she’d have no need for questions like this one if she would only use the planner I got her for Christmas last year.
“Yes,” I tell her. “I’ll see you next Monday. The wedding isn’t until the following weekend.”
With a flick of her wrist, she makes a note on the same sheet of paper I just handed back to her. I recoil at the disorganization. “I’m excited to hear about the progress you make with your assignment.”
I shuffle to the door, my steps weighed down by the presence of the letter in my pocket.
I can almost hear it hissing.
Lose your virginity. That’s all I ask.
“Thanks for today,” I tell Sandy, even though I feel just as hopeless leaving her office as I did when I got here an hour ago. Maybe even more so.
Sensing my resignation, she gives me her signature closemouthed smile.
“Take care, Phoebe.”
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