Description

How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?: A Novel

By Anna Montague — Paperback, November 25, 2025

Magda Eklund has spent a lifetime holding everyone else together. Her anxious therapy patients lean on her to fix their spiraling habits. Her longtime colleagues rely on her to mediate their constant bickering. And after the death of her best friend, Sara, Magda has tiptoed through grief by helping Sara’s prickly widower sort through the last pieces of the life they all once shared. At nearly seventy, she keeps herself moving through carefully maintained routines. She tells everyone she’s fine. She almost believes it.

Then Magda finds Sara’s final wish tucked inside an old journal: the blueprint for a cross-country road trip they were meant to take for Magda’s seventieth birthday. And just like that, with Sara’s urn buckled into the passenger seat, Magda’s carefully structured life jolts into motion.

What follows is a wildly unexpected journey—one filled with jazz funerals in New Orleans, a hilariously chaotic women’s retreat in Texas, long-buried family secrets, and strangers who see Magda more clearly than she sees herself. Most surprising of all is the woman she meets along the way, who forces her to rethink the shape of her past… and the desires she quietly tucked away for decades.

As the miles pass and the horizon expands, Magda is finally confronted with the parts of herself she has ignored—her grief, her longing, her identity, and the complex truth about her relationship with Sara. The journey becomes a reckoning, a liberation, and proof that it’s never too late to choose a new beginning.

Warm, wise, and irresistibly funny, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is a late-in-life coming-of-self story about friendship, queerness, grief, reinvention, and the beautiful mess of starting over at any age.

For more heartfelt, character-driven LGBTQ+ fiction, visit Queerazon.com.