Richard Harder has a 3.97 GPA, a name he's spent his whole life living down, and roughly fourteen months before his mother finds out what his psychology thesis is actually about.It starts with a Facebook post — a woman claiming her IQ rose thirty-seven points from a very specific daily habit involving her husband. It's the kind of thing you laugh at, forward to a friend, and forget. Dick doesn't forget it. He builds a thesis proposal out of it instead.But the joke is a door, not the room. Underneath it is a promise Dick made to himself in a Nebraska church pew at nineteen, in his one good shirt, after losing the person who taught him what he was watching for in others without ever having the words to name it. Growing up Mennonite in a town of eight hundred people gave him a toolkit built for drought years and quiet faith — sturdy, honest, and, when it came to the thing that actually took his closest friend from him, catastrophically incomplete.Dick has spent every year since building better tools. This is just the strangest one yet.Hard 2 Swallow: An Oral Study is Book One of a planned trilogy following Richard Harder's unlikely career — continuing in Hard 2 Swallow 2: A Gay Perspective and concluding in Hard 2 Swallow 3: Vindication.A novel about grief, faith, and the absurd, deeply human lengths we'll go to for the people we couldn't save — with a sense of humor sharp enough to get you in the door.
