Ashley Whitaker’s debut novel, Bitter Texas Honey, introduces us to Joan West—a character so messy, contradictory, and self-deluded that you’ll either want to shake her or give her a reluctant hug. Set against the backdrop of early 2010s Texas politics and family dysfunction, this novel serves up a cocktail of sharp wit, cringe comedy, and surprising tenderness that doesn’t always go down smoothly but certainly leaves an impression.
As a former Texan who’s navigated the state’s cultural contradictions, I found myself both nodding in recognition and wincing in discomfort at Whitaker’s portrayal of a young woman caught between creative ambition, political identity crisis, and family chaos. This is the literary equivalent of watching someone fall down stairs in slow motion—painful, sometimes darkly funny, and impossible to look away from.
The Misadventures of Joan West: Self-Proclaimed Artist, Actual Disaster
Whitaker introduces us to twenty-three-year-old Joan West, a recent UT graduate working as a legislative intern while desperately clinging to her identity as a “writer” despite producing almost nothing. Joan’s life is a series of contradictions: she’s a newly minted conservative who despises liberals but surrounds herself with them; she’s supposedly researching her novel but mostly getting high and making terrible romantic decisions; she thinks of herself as sophisticated while being painfully clueless.
What makes Joan compelling isn’t her likability (she frequently lacks it) but her raw, desperate hunger to be something more than she is. Every disastrous decision—from pursuing the contemptuous barista Roberto to using her cousin Wyatt’s suicide as fodder for her nonexistent novel—stems from Joan’s frantic need to be seen as an artist with depth rather than what she fears she actually is: a privileged, directionless young woman dependent on her dysfunctional parents.
Family Circus: The West-Duncan Dynasty of Dysfunction
The novel’s most vivid achievement is its depiction of Joan’s sprawling, messy Texas family. Her father Randy, a perpetual man-child running a for-profit audio engineering school who cycles through inappropriate girlfriends; her mother Dolly, a recovering addict with boundary issues; her brother Henry, the competent one who escaped; and her cousin Wyatt, a musical prodigy with untreated mental illness.
Whitaker depicts family gatherings with uncomfortable precision—conversations veer from political arguments to insults to reminiscences with dizzying speed. These scenes pulse with authenticity, revealing how families cultivate their own languages of hurt, humor, and history:
“It’s Saturday night! This is when people are supposed to want to be together. Who wants to be alone on a Saturday night?!” Joan’s father screams about his latest girlfriend wanting space—a perfect encapsulation of his neediness and entitlement.
When tragedy strikes with Wyatt’s suicide, Whitaker doesn’t flinch from showing the family’s toxic mixture of grief, blame, and denial. The funeral scene, where Joan derails her eulogy with a shocking Satanic outburst, is both horrifying and darkly comic—a moment when grief, rage, and poor impulse control collide spectacularly.
Politics, Religion, and Identity: The Texas Trifecta
One of the novel’s most interesting elements is its exploration of politics as personal identity. Joan’s conservative rebrand after her “liberal phase” isn’t about policy but about belonging. She clings to talk radio hosts like religious figures, finding comfort in their certainty even as she feels out of step with both liberal Austin and her Tea Party family.
Whitaker resists the easy choice of making Joan’s conservatism a simple punchline, instead showing how political identity becomes a life raft for someone drowning in uncertainty. Joan’s fixation on Mitt Romney—who represents the orderly, respectable authority figure absent from her life—is both pathetic and painfully understandable.
Religion plays a similar role in the novel, with evangelicalism serving as both community glue and convenient excuse for avoiding difficult truths. The contrast between Joan’s cynical view of her family’s faith and her cousin Wyatt’s genuine spiritual searching adds complexity to what could have been simple mockery.
Strengths and Weaknesses: A Mixed Bag of Texas Honey
What Works:
- Character development – Joan evolves in messy, non-linear ways that feel authentic rather than following a neat redemption arc
- Family dynamics – The novel excels at depicting the complex web of loyalty, resentment, and love in dysfunctional families
- Texas setting – Whitaker brings the state’s contradictions to life through specific details, from the capitol’s politics to rural ranch houses
- Dark humor – The novel’s willingness to find comedy in uncomfortable places gives it a bracing honesty
- Addiction portrayal – Joan’s relationship with Adderall and other substances is depicted with nuance rather than melodrama
What Falls Short:
- Pacing issues – The novel sometimes meanders, particularly in its middle sections, without a strong narrative drive
- Overreliance on coincidence – Some plot developments feel contrived rather than organic
- Underdeveloped secondary characters – Figures like Claire and Henry sometimes feel more like plot devices than fully realized people
- Uneven tone – The shifts between comedy and tragedy occasionally feel jarring rather than purposeful
- Repetitive patterns – Joan’s cycles of bad decisions can become tedious rather than illuminating
The Art of Failure: Writing About Not Writing
What’s most fascinating about Bitter Texas Honey is its meta-narrative about the struggle to create art. Joan isn’t writing her novel—she’s writing about not writing her novel, collecting “research” through relationships while producing nothing. The novel asks uncomfortable questions about authenticity, appropriation, and whether suffering for art’s sake actually produces anything of value.
When Joan finally does experience something genuinely traumatic with Wyatt’s suicide, her immediate impulse to mine it for material becomes a damning commentary on her artistic pretensions. Yet Whitaker doesn’t simply condemn Joan; instead, she shows how art-making can be both a selfish act of cannibalization and a genuine attempt to make meaning from chaos.
Final Verdict: Flawed But Fearless
Bitter Texas Honey isn’t a perfect debut. It sometimes gets lost in its own digressions, and Joan’s self-absorption can test readers’ patience. But Whitaker’s willingness to let her protagonist be genuinely messy—not quirky-messy or adorably-messy but actually-might-ruin-her-life messy—gives the novel a bracing authenticity that more polished debuts often lack.
The novel ends with Joan in a tentative place of recovery, not fully healed but at least facing reality. This feels earned rather than inspirational, a small victory wrested from considerable defeat. In its final pages, as Joan begins to write haikus about her daily life on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, there’s a suggestion that true art might emerge not from grand dramatic gestures but from honest engagement with the world as it is.
Bitter Texas Honey joins recent works like Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This and Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed in exploring millennial female identity through a lens both cynical and searching. While it lacks the polished precision of those works, its messiness is part of its charm—much like Texas itself, it’s big, contradictory, and impossible to ignore.
For Readers Who Enjoyed:
- The Idiot by Elif Batuman
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
- Fleabag (the TV series)
- The Pisces by Melissa Broder
- The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
Who Should Read This:
- Anyone who’s ever pretended to be working on a creative project while actually doing nothing
- Former or current Texans who understand the state’s bizarre political landscape
- Readers who don’t need their protagonists to be likable, just interesting
- Anyone fascinated by dysfunctional family dynamics
- Those who appreciate dark comedy that doesn’t pull punches
Ashley Whitaker has crafted a debut that, while uneven at times, announces a distinctive voice unafraid to delve into uncomfortable truths about art, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Through Joan West’s chaotic journey, she reminds us that becoming who we’re meant to be is rarely a straight path—sometimes it involves detours through jail cells, rehab centers, and ranch houses in the middle of nowhere Texas.
