Baby Bruise

by Danielle Chelosky

FFO: daddy issues; hickeys; high school house parties; Sean Baker's Red Rocket; downers; Elliott Smith; binge-drinking; problematic age gaps; crying and throwing up; heartbreak

Genres: Fiction

112 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2025

About the author

Danielle Chelosky is a writer and journalist from New York. She works at Stereogum and has bylines in NPR, The Fader, and Billboard. She is an editor at Hobart and an editorial assistant at Amphetamine Sulphate. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2022 and was awarded the Lori Hertzberg Prize for Creativity. She is the author of PREGAMING GRIEF and BABY BRUISE.

Reviews

[Chris | Company Pants · Rating 5 out of 5]

Years ago, I went back home to visit my family and to help them out with some work around their farm. My dad and I spent most of the day working in the kind of silence that has always been a hallmark of our relationship - not an inability to converse, but rather a comfort in not having to say too much to each other to get things accomplished.

At some point, he offhandedly mentioned how I used to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night when I was a teenager that was still living at home. I stared at him, dumbfounded, as I had always been under the assumption that I had somehow flown under his radar each of the dozens and dozens of times that I climbed out my childhood bedroom window and into the expanse of the night. I mentioned this to him and he laughed at me - that kind of “oh, you sweet summer child” kind of laugh that momentarily enraged me at it’s condescension.

It was at this point that he reminded me that I had left a step-stool outside of my window, partially hidden in the bushes that hugged that side of the house, but clearly not hidden well enough. “Did you really think that we never noticed that?” he asked me. I had a million questions. Why did he never confront me about it? Why didn’t he ever just move the stool to stop me from my late night wandering? Did he and my mom ever go into my room while I was out in the middle of the night? I never asked and I likely never will.

Baby Bruise by Danielle Chelosky is the kind of novella that slaps you backwards into memories of an era from your life that you are likely thinking that you had long moved past. No matter what you may have endured throughout the messiness of your teenage years, there is a wealth of emotion and circumstance broiling throughout Baby Bruise that is way too easy to identify with. Almost as if Danielle is telling the part of our stories that we aren’t supposed to share with anyone - the part that we keep locked inside our heads to the grave. The biggest compliment that I can give this novella is that the moment that I read its final sentence, I immediately flipped back to the beginning and read the entire thing all over again.

The story follows a teenage girl, who tells the scattered figures throughout the story that her name is February and is later referred to as Baby Bruise, through a short period of her life at the age of sixteen. Now, tell me if any of this feels familiar to your own life - A heartbreak due to a disinterested thespian classmate leads to long nights spent soaking both in the bath and in the chaos of memory and longing which leads to sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with a best friend which leads to hitching a ride to a party from the older guy that vouched for you being old enough to buy booze after you locked eyes with in that way that slows time down for a moment in the ratty convenience store with the clerk who ultimately doesn’t give a shit. Even if this specific scenario has never happened to you - some version of it has.

What separates Danielle’s writing from other work that gets lumped into any sort of “coming of age” pile is her ability to make sure that you are aware of both the allure and the ugliness of these teenage encounters - the ease into which she’s drawn into situations in which she allows herself to lose control with alcohol, drugs and other delights and the eventual destructive fallout from those choices are represented in equal balance and never treated as some sort of regret manifesto or a tome of moral grandstanding. Instead, she touches on these instances as definitive moments in her life that pointed her in new directions that helped open her eyes, not just to new experiences, sensations and music, but to a new path in life that is better informed by how the world and the people inside of it really operate and deal with each other. What starts as simple longing for the emptiness of high school heartbreak quickly shifts into what will later become the reality of adulthood, with all of it’s pain, pleasures, torment and wonder.

Despite barely spilling over the hundred page mark, Baby Bruise is filled with scenes that will have you asking yourself if some of these situations could have really happened. The line between fiction and reality is blurred, not because anything that Danielle writes feels like an impossibility, but more so because it feels all too possible that with a few small alterations to the choices that you yourself made yourself at the age of sixteen, an entirely different path to the future might have opened up in front of you.

Danielle has been a writer and editor over at the legendary site Stereogum for what feels like forever and her writing is so baked into what makes the site itself an appealing destination in the world of music right now. But with Baby Bruise and her previous release, Pregaming Grief, it’s exhilarating to watch her spread out and take up much more room as a writer with the space and the audience to tell her own stories. As readers, we are so often looking to find the pieces of ourselves in the words of others, something to hang onto to make us feel as if we aren’t so alone in the enormity of the universe and in this regard, Danielle has already gotten to a place in her writing where she is able to eke out those tendrils of familiarity, both dark and light, and urge us to grab hold and take a ride.

Thank you to Filthy Loot and their imprint, Talented Perverts, for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of Danielle’s new novella. Please go support Filthy Loot/Talented Perverts as it’s more important than ever to show independent publishers how important and vital they are.

[Books For Decaying Millennials · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book as part of the Filthy Loot Press subscription Club. All views and Opinions are my own.
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Picking at scabs, watching them heal, picking them again..hoping for a memorable scar to form.
When you have immersed yourself in ice water, there comes a point where you're the numbness sets in. You're not entirely numb, you can still feel, still move, but so much of you is cold, sensation and feeling muted with occasional sting from those bodily regions announcing the ice waters effects.
It's to these sensory memories that Danielle Chelosky's novella Baby Bruise takes me. Teenagers skirting that fine ledge of a path, that broken, jagged line connecting childhood to Adulthood. Chelosky has imbued every page of this novella with a cruel beauty. Teenagers gasping for connection, for lasting feeling, amidst a cruelly indifferent world. A canopy of nihilism hangs over everything, leaving moments of potential tenderness and healing devoid of warmth. Baby Bruise reminds me of the Larry Clarke film "KIDS". In both Chelosky's novella and Clarke's film, young folk faced with a harsh reality of the world they live in, push themselves to feel, to experience something that stays with them. They drive themselves to the verge of self destruction, so at least then they're left with more than a spreading numbness, the cold, the world has left them with.

[emma orland · Rating 5 out of 5]

i wanted to bruise my knees kneeling at their feet

[Colette Bernheim · Rating 5 out of 5]

danielle chelosky the voice of a generation … if only this book could’ve gone on forever ….

[Trey Breen · Rating 4 out of 5]

really gets into that itchy feeling about doing things for people you shouldn't

[hannah! · Rating 4 out of 5]

very teenage girl

[Codycvlp · Rating 5 out of 5]

like an r rated degrassi episode.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the title, the font of the title, the cover, the size of the book and the writing, of course! 16 year olds doing drugs and being obsessed with older inappropriate men is catnip to me.

[Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this.

"I wanted non-existence, or maybe I just wanted to return to who I was before my first heartbreak"

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lot of promise, imperfect execution. By about the halfway point I’d begun to notice patterns of overwriting adverbs and adjectives and other minor clichés—things one would expect from an author in their twenties. I wanted to enjoy this but didn’t due to the combination of predictability and lowered emotional stakes. In fairness, it was a far better teen-chaos novel than Lidia Yuknavich’s Dora, with a self-aware directness at moments that held the story together. But it doesn’t draw enough insight from the details of teenage mayhem, and doesn’t have enough critical distance from all that, to become truly self-aware. If Michelle Tea had drawn these characters they’d have been far more unsatisfied with simple inebriation, crime, and shouting, and would have asked greater questions brought on my higher emotional stakes. Instead things wrap up at the moment I would have hoped for them to expand and deepen. I suspect Chelosky’s going to write good things down the road, but this is a starting point rather than a destination.

[Seebs · Rating 4 out of 5]

woof, reminded me of my teenage yrs and how uneventful they were

[CORSAK fan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never went to parties in high school because at one point I was barely maintaining three friendships at that point in my life. One friend was a soon-to-be English major who geeked out over Star Wars and Taylor Swift in her free time. One friend was crafty and played French Horn and always knew how to cook well. One friend was and still is a self-described incel and hated most people at that godforsaken high school and everyone collectively agreed she was an odd goose. For most of high school, I thought I wanted to be a translator. Or an interpreter of some kind. The point here is I wasn't popular enough to get invited to non-birthday parties with drugs or at least bad behavior because I was a nerd and my three friends were also nerds. I couldn't sneak out because how would I do that? My mom was almost at home watching or at least listening or at least knowing when the door opened at all times. I didn't have a car. I didn't end up becoming rebellious until I was 22 and moved out to finish uni. My definition of being rebellious was drinking / binge-drinking at the campus pub with friends, going to drag shows, staying up until 1 a.m. talking to friends, letting male friends crash in my room for a bit if they needed time away from their roommates, sleeping in until 11 a.m. I had the rebellious teenager phase 9 years later than when it would have behooved me to have started it. I didn't do anything dramatically stupid or unsafe or illegal but I also don't think waiting until 22 to not feel suffocated by hundreds of rules was good either. I'm still learning how to break against that and learning what to do with all my freedom. It's such a relief to actually have it.

I said all of that to say that Danielle and I have had pretty different upbringings. I would have been way, way too chicken to ever pull off the stuff that happens in this book. I've only yelled at my mom once and that was when I was 17. Now I barely want to get angry at her because that, too, is rebellious.

Reading this book felt like the three times I've had frostbite. The first time, I didn't know what was happening to my fingertip. The second time, I was familiar and the numb wasn't as painful. The third time, the numbness hurt.

All of that goes to say that this book perfectly captures emotions so many of us have most likely experienced. Even though I was a textbook goody-two-shoes in most ways growing up, I also felt a growing numbness in my brain I tried to bury away. Not with alcohol but mostly staying in bad friendships way longer than I should have because I didn't know any better or didn't want to have to worry about what the other person would think if I left first. I think the chaos and harrowing reality of being a teenager is expressed here so beautifully. Everything risks being thrown off delicate balance / equilibrium in a matter of minutes.

Also a small side note that the font on the cover / of the chalter titles is beautiful and a good choice for the vibe of the book and the cover is also perfect.

[Downward · Rating 4 out of 5]

really enjoyed this slice of teenage self destruction, which balances itself by never getting too dark, never really letting the bad thing happen. there's a tension there that exists then and maintains even as we cycle through the dramas that are both petty and very serious, the petty dramas influencing our read on the serious dramas because it reminds us that we're dealing with a child who can barely be held accountable. but that's what teenage self destruction is: it's someone who has all the worldview and responsibilities of a child, including their naked impulses, with an advanced and degraded sense of vice that young adulthood opens you up to. it's why being a teen is dangerous. it's why being a teen is fun.

[Luz · Rating 5 out of 5]

being introduced to elliott smith while high on downers? there is really no such thing as a unique experience…pathetic? poetic.

[☘ · Rating 4 out of 5]

can i get five more of these?

[Ehren W · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you ever snuck out at night when you were not supposed to and did things with people you were not supposed to hang out with, then this book is for you.

Heartbreaking, humorous, poignant, touching, and repulsive. Just like a lot of people's teenage years. I related deeply to numerous parts of this, as it caused my mind to warp back to multiple times I was running around being crazy as a teenager. As an adult, I just felt an overwhelming sense of dread, worry, and sadness for our protagonist. Lots of us have been there in some way, and we know the trajectory is a rough one.

This is a quick read, thought not an easy one. I recommend it highly to anyone whose parents didn't know what to do with them for a chunk of their lives.