to be without her is a tragedy - sunburn

on secret summers, impossible choices, and the truth of women who love women

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To be with her is a sin, to be without her is a tragedy.

— Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

Some novels don't need to be loud to wreck you. Sunburn, the debut by Chloe Michelle Howarth, is one of them. It’s a slow, tender unraveling coming-of-age story wrapped in sun, shame, and first love. But it’s also more than a book. For many, it’s a mirror. Or a memory.

Set in rural 1990s Ireland, Sunburn follows Lucy, a teenage girl navigating the unspoken tension between the life she’s been taught to want and the life she can barely admit she craves. She’s meant to love her best friend Martin. She’s meant to marry him. But instead, her gaze keeps falling on Susannah. Her mouth, her laugh, the way she glows in the sun. A secret summer romance begins, sensual and innocent all at once, and so does the slow suffocation of choice.

Lucy’s town, Crossmore, is small. Its beliefs are even smaller. And love between girls is not something spoken out loud, let alone lived.

But Sunburn isn’t just a story about queer love. It’s about what it means to love someone in silence. To want something so badly your whole body aches, and still feel like you have to pretend you don’t.

The Secret That Writes Back

For many women who love women, the first love arrives in hiding. It’s not adorned with flowers or confetti, it slips in quietly, between friendship and something that has no name yet. Often, it begins on the page.

In Sunburn, Lucy and Susannah write each other love letters because they have nowhere else to put their feelings. Their words become a parallel world - more honest than anything they can say out loud. This is not just a romantic trope. It’s ritual.

So many of us became writers because we had to be. Because writing was the only place where our desire could breathe. We kept journals no one could find. We wrote emails and never pressed send. We learned to craft language like a spell: to protect, to confess, to survive.

The page doesn’t flinch when you call it love. Sometimes, that’s all you have.

The Closet Is Not a Room — It’s a Town

We often talk about “the closet” as if it’s a door you can walk through. But for many, it’s more like a town. A community. A family. A religion. A culture. And coming out isn’t a moment - it’s a risk.

This is familiar to many. Loving another woman isn't just a personal act. It's a communal rupture. It means knowing that some people may never look at you the same way again. That some doors will shut. That love might cost you your home, your faith, your people.

So Lucy doesn’t come out. She holds on. She delays. She hopes she can have both: the girl and the world. But Sunburn knows (and we know) that eventually, the ache of compromise becomes unbearable.

Sin, Shame, and Sacred Things

Religion hovers over Sunburn like smoke. It curls around Lucy’s choices. It coils inside Susannah’s guilt. Theirs is not just a forbidden love - it’s a love wrapped in theology.

For queer women raised in religious settings, this portrayal cuts deep. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s familiar. We were told that love between women was unnatural. That desire made us sinful.

Loving another woman often meant mourning the God you were taught to adore. Or worse: believing that God was mourning you.

The Haunting of Alternate Futures

What lingers most in Sunburn is not what Lucy chooses — but what she loses.

She loves Susannah. But she also loves her mother. She loves her town. She loves the life she thought she was supposed to have. And she can’t keep both. So she picks the version of herself that feels safer. And she mourns the one that felt real.

This, perhaps, is the most devastating part of being a queer woman in a world that doesn’t want you to be: sometimes, you have to let go of a life that was yours. You don’t lose her because it didn’t matter. You lose her because everything else mattered too much.

We don’t talk enough about the grief of unlived futures. The weight of what-could-have-been. The years you spend carrying a version of yourself that didn’t get to survive.

Lucy carries Susannah as a ghost. Some of us are still doing the same.

A Book Like a Mirror

Sunburn isn’t loud. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t declare itself political or revolutionary. But for those of us who recognize ourselves in Lucy’s longing, in her silences, in her letters, it feels like being seen.

It’s a book about love. But more than that, it’s about what it costs.

And for the women who have loved other women quietly, dangerously, or too late this novel holds something sacred.

If you’ve ever wanted to pause summer. To stay in the garden a little longer. To hold her hand when no one’s looking.

Then this book was written for you.

Too late I realise that she has been the Summer of my life. What a slow and painful death this shall be.

― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

With love,

Núria.

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