• One-line summary of the book: Interweaving personal essays and immersive third-person portraits of modern military partners, Have You Landed? invites 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.

• This my debut essay collection and is being published by Potomac Books, an imprint of University of Nebraska Press that focuses on military history and military stories.

• This is nonfiction...BUT many of the essays read like short fiction. So, if you're more of a fiction reader, this is the book for you!

• The book features a mix of personal essays based on my own experience with military life, and fourteen written "portraits" of military partners written in a very close third person point-of-view. These portraits are all based on in-depth interviews with real military partners across branches. 

• Thematically, it grapples with topics like mental health, identity, parenting and infertility, faith, family, and relationships. It is also, as the subtitle points to, a compilation of love stories. 

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• Here's what others are saying about 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

  • ​“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

  • ​​“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