Tapas. Hotel atriums. Tapas bars inside hotel atriums. Wall niches. Track lighting. Laminated information cards. Eight kinds of curtain valances. Indoor things designed to look like outdoor things. Blue-tinted water glasses. Hammered copper elevator doors. Brass earrings like Buddhist gongs. Thing and thing and thing: a life assembled from details that almost mean something.

From virtual Portland to the streets of Boston, a woman moves through spaces that blur together—corporate, decorative, vaguely intimate. Beneath the surface of repetition and pattern is a quieter reality: a private identity, carefully concealed, shared only with a few.

Your Thoughts Are Important to Us is a fast-paced, formally inventive novel about dislocation, loneliness, and the fragile, often absurd desire for connection in a world that feels both over-designed and strangely empty.

Praise for Mike Heppner and Your Thoughts Are Important to Us

“Heppner is a bold, uncompromising author capable of negotiating the literary chasm between technological mumbo-jumbo and real emotional depth.”

—Philadelphia City Paper

“Heppner is a fearsome cultural critic disguised in a novelist’s clothing.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Mike Heppner’s Your Thoughts Are Important to Us blends sharp-eyed deadpan humor with deep sympathy for its protagonist, who’s navigating the tricky terrain of gender identity. This strikingly original combination delivers razor-sharp satire of contemporary mores while capturing the profoundly lonesome spirit of our time.”

—Aaron Hamburger, author of The Shiva Bandit and Hotel Cuba