Stephanie Reents, "We Loved to Run" (Hogarth, 2025)

Dec 12, 2025

In this engaging conversation, Stephanie Reents, an accomplished author and former collegiate cross-country runner, dives deep into her novel, We Loved to Run. She explores the unique collective voice used to capture the dynamics of a women’s cross-country team. Topics include the harsh realities of female athletes, the tension between competition and camaraderie, and navigating trauma. With a lens on 90s feminism, she discusses societal pressures and the scrutiny of women's bodies in sports, reflecting on timeless issues that resonate today.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Collective Voice Reveals Team Dynamics

Stephanie Reents frames the team as a collective 'we' to capture communal identity and shared experience.
The collective voice creates friction between team assumptions and individual inner lives.

ADVICE

When To Use A 'We' Narrator

Use a collective narrator when you want the group to feel like a character with its own will.
Balance the 'we' with individual POVs to reveal secrets the group can't know.

INSIGHT

Running As A Psychological Bargain

Running functions as a deal with the devil: you bargain with your brain to let your body endure pain.
That bargain mirrors team relationships where teammates both push and threaten each other's success.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

At Frost, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the runners on the women’s cross country team have their sights set on the 1992 New England Division Three Championships and will push themselves through every punishing workout and skipped meal to achieve their goal. But Kristin, the team’s star, is hiding a secret about what happened over the summer, and her unpredictable behavior jeopardizes the girls’ chance to win. Team Captain Danielle is convinced she can restore Kristin’s confidence, even if it means burying her own past. As the final meet approaches, Kristin, Danielle, and the rest of the girls must transcend their individual circumstances and run the race as a team.
Told from the perspective of the six fastest team members, We Loved to Run (Hogarth, 2025) deftly illuminates the intensity of female friendship and desire and the nearly impossible standards young women sometimes set for themselves. With startling honesty and boundless empathy, Stephanie Reents reveals how girls—even those in competition—find ways to love one another and turn feelings of powerlessness into shared strength and self-determination.

Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Recommended Books:

Marisa Crane, A Sharp Endless Need
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network