HAVE YOU LANDED?
MILITARY LOVE STORIES IN ESSAYS
COMING AUGUST 1, 2026
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Six months into her marriage, Emma’s husband leaves for a military base across the globe. He belongs, after all, to the United States Navy. But this deployment is different. The world is locked down, and Emma is newly arrived in a city where she knows no one, alone in a house that doesn’t yet feel like home.
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With a nonexistent social life and pandemic-deployment levels of free time, Emma turns to books for company—only to find the bookstore shelves empty of military spouse stories.
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Then she has a powerful realization. What if the stories aren’t missing? What if they just haven’t been gathered yet?​​​
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​What follows becomes far more than Emma imagined: years of interviews with military spouses across branches and across the country—wives, girlfriends, exes, husbands, widows—people living with distance, uncertainty, and the constant possibility of loss.
Through these conversations, she meets Madelyn, a young intelligence officer’s wife isolated in rural Nevada; Katarina, a Marine Corps spouse caught in the crossfire of a foreign riot; Isa, a therapist who recognizes the signs of mental illness in her own airman; and Megan, a new mother unaware she is kissing her husband goodbye for the last time.
Written in close, immersive third person, Have You Landed? brings together fourteen unforgettable portraits of modern military partners—stories of love and loss, romance and risk, faith and betrayal. Intimate, raw, and deeply human, these stories invite readers behind the curtain of military life, revealing what it truly costs to love someone whose life is built on service and separation—and what it takes to keep choosing that love.
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Early praise for HAVE YOU LANDED?
“Equal parts tender and unblinking, HAVE YOU LANDED? is a generous and deeply immersive portrait of the most intimate proximities to military life. More than that, though, it’s a record of the profound power, complexity, and dignity inherent in an individual life, and of the constellation of ways we are—all of us—part of greater wholes.” —Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I’ve Taken My Body: Essays
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“Immersive, intimate, and reminiscent of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, HAVE YOU LANDED? has the quality of a song performed in moving harmony. Each voice is its own, but together they create a sound that is at once stoic, brave, and tender. For me, this collection did what the best books do: It reminded me that I am never alone.” —Simone Gorrindo, author of The Wives: A Memoir
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“Comery rewrites and broadens what we know of military living. . . . The quiet details of lives inside the imperative distance shine a light on what love looks like to servicepeople and civilians caring for country and home. There’s no hiding what’s hardest here: infertility, fraught faith, child rearing, relocation, death, devastation, war. Perhaps the figures depicted made time and space for inquiry because they grasped that someone in the future would desperately need a portrait of what they’d already survived, and despite the distance and difficulty, learn how they might thrive. To be a military partner is to know that the calling away can happen with no warning and all must endure despite this. The hope is that everyone caught in the fray comes out stronger, closer, whole. Have You Landed? is here to remind us all that ‘sometimes the leaving feels like falling apart, and sometimes it feels like falling in love'” —Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up
Our Best War Stories: Prize-winning Poetry & Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards, Vol. 2
Emma's poem, "Shipwreck on Padre Island," joins a powerhouse lineup of military-connected writers in this anthology published by MiddleWest Press in partnership with Line of Advance.
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Available in paperback, E-book, and with your subscription to Kindle Unlimited.