Alison Kinney | United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope

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An exploration of real-life, relatable rejections through reporting and lively storytelling United States of Rejection begins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.

This is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the rejected: lovers, families, neighbors, and a nation and its people. Although we’re taught not to care about others’ opinions, rejection always hurts, and it hurts some people a lot more than others. To prove it, this book marshals contemporary neuroscience, the Founding Fathers’ rejection advice, and four centuries of personal narratives, many of them hilarious, many more heartbreaking. These rejection and acceptance stories span loving and disastrous American first encounters, soldiers and dancers rejected on front lines and chorus lines, playground bullies invoked before the Senate, and generations of lovers and patriots battling or swiping right to defend their loved ones and their country.
Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more evil, than of good.” But rejection is often unjust, often deserved, and unusually complicated, depending on who’s rejecting whom and why.
In laboratories, diaries, self-help manuals, auditions, lawsuits, and wars, we find models for “getting past” rejections, not just through personal resilience, but also through creating accountability and justice. United States of Rejection begins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.

ALISON KINNEY is assistant professor of writing (nonfiction) at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is the author of the books Hood and Avidly Reads Opera. Her writing on culture, history, science, and social justice has appeared in many publications, online or in print, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Lapham’s Quarterly, The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, and Gay Magazine. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

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