There’s a specific kind of chaos that lives in the marrow of early queer girlhood—a cocktail of bad decisions, unrequited crushes, boundary-testing hookups, and the dizzying ache of wanting to feel wanted. In Cacoethes, Chloe de Lullington captures that chaos with a voice so sharp it could cut, yet so tender it feels like a bruise you keep pressing. The story follows Erin, a British university fresher clinging to the “Cool Girl” archetype as she stumbles through a haze of club nights, online dating, and emotionally lopsided entanglements. Her world veers off-course when she matches with Aidan, an older American man who drags her into a BDSM dynamic that starts intoxicating and quickly turns unsafe. Erin’s friends raise the alarm—but Erin is caught in that murky space between desire and danger, where submission feels like control until it doesn’t.

One night, when Aidan says he wants to break up, Erin falls apart and is quietly picked up by Bo, a gentle classmate who becomes both a lifeline and a mirror. But instead of staying in that safety, Erin eventually rebounds into the world of sugar dating, where she meets Hal—a charismatic, former comedian who gives her what Aidan couldn’t: attention, aftercare, and a warped sense of stability. Meanwhile, Erin’s feelings for Bo—complicated, closeted, and deeply inconvenient—simmer beneath the surface, until Hal begins to unravel, pushing her to confront what she’s actually been running from. By the end, Erin is no longer performing confidence for the male gaze; she’s choosing softness, queerness, and real connection in the form of Hal’s daughter, Harriett, who offers her something startlingly rare: a future.

Erin’s journey is messy, loud, and often painful: she falls for men who neglect her and overlooks the women who see her most clearly. Her relationships are transactional in more ways than one, and yet they’re also sites of genuine longing, pleasure, and transformation. Erin’s narrative voice—chaotic, self-effacing, and heartbreakingly perceptive—reads like a diary scrawled in eyeliner on the back of a club flyer. Her stream-of-consciousness reflections are laced with biting commentary, especially on sex, power, and the limits of feminist rhetoric when it fails to make space for desire’s contradictions.

Cacoethes asks big questions: What does agency look like when you enjoy being dominated? What does empowerment mean when pleasure is tangled with performance and survival? What happens when your queerness doesn’t arrive softly but explodes through heartbreak and jealousy and slow, stumbling realizations?

If you’ve ever loved the wrong person, ghosted a good one, or found yourself wondering why affection sometimes feels like danger and sometimes like home—this book will see you. Cacoethes is a love letter to queer messiness, and a reminder that sometimes becoming yourself is less about choosing the right path and more about surviving the detours with a little bit of your softness still intact.

📖 Read this if you love: razor-sharp coming-of-age stories, bisexual awakenings, chaotic but introspective girl narrators, and voice-driven fiction that doesn’t shy away from power, performance, or mess. 

🔑 Key Themes: Bisexual Self-Discovery, Power and Submission, Queerness and Desire, Sex Work and Emotional Labor, Girlhood and Performance.