Call It What You Want

Call It What You Want is a contemporary romance by Alissa DeRogatis, published in 2023 and first issued independently. It is set in 2016 and follows Sloane Hart through her final year at college, with the drinking, the parties and the friendships of that period as its background.

Sloane has decided that her senior year is going to be the best one yet and spends it the usual way until she meets Ethan Brady. What the two of them have is not a relationship and they both know it, so the novel spends its time on the gap between what they call it and what it is, and then on the consequences when one of them wants it to be something else.

DeRogatis writes in the first person and leans on the texture of the period, so the book depends on its narrator's voice rather than on plot mechanics. It was first published independently, which is how many of its readers found it, and the relationship at its centre is deliberately unromantic for long stretches.