Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry

Overview

Joya Goffney's debut novel centers on Quinn Jackson, a high schooler who processes her anxieties by turning them into lists—cataloging everything from embarrassing crying jags to boys she's too afraid to approach. The habit functions as a coping mechanism, a way of containing feelings on paper rather than confronting them in the world. That fragile system collapses when her private journal disappears.

An anonymous account begins circulating pages from the journal online, threatening to expose its full contents unless Quinn completes seven items from one especially dreaded list—each one a fear she has been quietly avoiding. With no clear suspects and her reputation on the line, Quinn reluctantly partners with Carter Bennett, the classmate last seen with her notebook, to hunt down the person responsible.

What begins as a mystery plot doubles as a coming-of-age arc: as Quinn is pushed through the very fears she cataloged, she's forced to practice the honesty and risk-taking she'd previously only allowed herself on paper, and a romance develops alongside the investigation.

A Fresh Voice in Contemporary YA Romance

The novel arrived as part of a wave of YA romances centering Black teen protagonists in stories driven by interiority and voice rather than issue-driven premises—Quinn's list-making is a character quirk before it's a plot device, and the book leans into humor and vulnerability in roughly equal measure. Its structure, built around the gradual revelation of a hidden document, invites comparisons to other list- and secret-driven teen romances, while its blackmail plot gives an otherwise familiar high school love story an added layer of tension and stakes.

Critically, the book was recognized as a strong entry in its genre upon release, noted for balancing comedic timing with emotional candor about the anxieties of adolescence—the fear of being truly seen, of embarrassment, of wanting things out loud. That tension between concealment and exposure is baked into the premise itself: Quinn's journal is meant to be the one place she can be fully honest, and the plot is essentially an engine for stripping that privacy away and asking what happens when a teenager's inner life becomes involuntarily public.

Why Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry Has Been Challenged

Reviewers praised the book for its comic warmth and its unusually honest rendering of teenage self-doubt, yet that same candor is precisely what has drawn objections from some readers and institutions. The novel has been challenged or restricted in 2 states and 3 districts tracked in this catalog, with complaints generally centered on its frank handling of sexuality and physical attraction rather than on the mystery or romance plot itself.

Much of the pushback concerns scenes and dialogue addressing teenage sexual desire, including references to sex and body image that some parents and school officials have deemed inappropriate for the intended age group. Because the story is told through Quinn's unfiltered internal lists—several of which touch on physical attraction and romantic longing in blunt terms—critics have argued the material is more explicit than typical YA fare, while defenders note that this same directness is what allows the book to speak honestly to teenage readers navigating similar feelings.