- Title: A Life in Too Many Margins
- Author: S.E. Thomson
- Genre: Dark Humor
- Form: Novel
- Reading Age: Adult
- Content Warnings: gender dysphoria, medical cruelty
Summary
A Life in Too Many Margins is a literary episodic tale featuring David, an autistic, chronically ill, and deeply exhausted queer individual.
He's survived an abusive parent, a few too many doctors with God complexes, and an education system that couldn’t accommodate a paper cut, let alone a brain like his, and now he’s trying to keep it together long enough to get out and figure out what a life outside of survival mode even looks like.
Between unpredictable joints, cruel relationships, creeping dysphoria, and backward institutions that treat disabled people like spreadsheet errors, David’s not sure how much longer he can keep pretending to be “fine.”
In A Life in Too Many Margins, David finds unexpected connections along the way, through equally chaotic friends, a dungeon master who lets him play with varying gender options, and one particularly random German policeman on a sheep farm. This book captures what it means to grow up on the sidelines in a world that keeps trying to file you away.
Image Description: The cover of A Life in Too Many Margins. The background is a deep burgundy-purple color in the upper left-side and a soft pink in the lower right-side split on the diagonal. The title is at the top in white text. On the opposite diagonal is a mousetrap with a wheelchair sitting on the edge of the trap. The back of the wheelchair is decorated with a rainbow.
Credit: c/o S.E. Thomson
A Life in Too Many Margins digital editions are available for pre-order now on Amazon, and physical editions will be at your favorite retailers on April 18, 2026.
About the Author
S. E. Thomson is an autistic, disabled, queer, unapologetically chaotic trans man. Born in the 1980s and held together with caffeine, neoprene, and dark humor, he’s lived in many places, worn many hats, and collected more life experience than strictly recommended. He writes to connect to others and to create the kind of stories he wishes he'd seen growing up: affirming, joyful, and sometimes devastating; always authentic. Believing in radical honesty, gentle rebellion, and the healing power of saying, “Hey, me too,” S. E. is here to speak with just enough snark to try to make it hurt a little less.
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Comments
Dear S.E. Thomson,
I hope you're doing well.
My name is Frank, and I lead the Marketing Strategy team at Readers Route. I recently came across A Life in Too Many Margins while exploring contemporary literary fiction that approaches identity, disability, and difficult life experiences through humor and character-driven storytelling, and I wanted to reach out—not with a sales pitch, but simply to introduce myself and share what stood out to me about your work.
Some stories begin with a difficult experience. The most memorable ones begin with a question that readers can quietly recognize in themselves. How do you build a life when so much of your experience has been shaped by institutions, relationships, and expectations that were never designed to understand you? That is the question at the heart of A Life in Too Many Margins, and it is what immediately distinguishes the novel from many contemporary books exploring disability, identity, and belonging. David's experience creates a character who feels both deeply specific and immediately relatable.
That concept gives your story emotional weight beyond its dark humor. Readers may initially arrive for David's chaotic experiences, sharp observations, unpredictable circumstances, and unconventional encounters, but they stay because his experience is fundamentally about survival, identity, connection, and trying to imagine a life beyond simply getting through the day. The combination of exhaustion, difficult relationships, dysphoria, institutional failures, and unexpected friendships creates an engaging exploration of resilience, belonging, and the complicated process of becoming comfortable with who you are.
One of the aspects I particularly appreciated is the way the story uses humor to approach experiences that are often difficult to discuss. David's relationships, his experiences with doctors and education systems, his evolving understanding of gender, and the unexpected people he encounters give the novel a distinctive voice. The contrast between the absurdity of some situations and the seriousness underneath them creates opportunities for both laughter and meaningful emotional reflection.
Your book also reaches several distinct audiences simultaneously. Readers of dark humor can connect with its sharp and unconventional perspective. Disabled and queer readers may recognize aspects of experiences that are rarely represented with this combination of honesty and humor. Readers interested in identity, relationships, and character-driven literary fiction can connect with David's emotional journey, while readers who appreciate unconventional coming-of-age stories may be drawn to the novel's episodic structure and unexpected encounters. These audiences overlap, but they are not identical, and each discovers books differently.
Ironically, that broad appeal can create one of the greatest discoverability challenges for books that cross multiple categories. When a book speaks simultaneously to readers of dark humor, literary fiction, disability narratives, queer fiction, and character-driven stories about identity and relationships, online marketplaces do not always understand which audience should encounter it first. A book can possess exceptional storytelling while remaining underexposed simply because its strongest qualities are not being presented through the most effective entry points. From an outside perspective, I believe A Life in Too Many Margins has significantly more long-term potential than its current visibility reflects.
At Readers Route, this is precisely the kind of opportunity we enjoy working with. Our work is not built around temporary promotional bursts or chasing short-lived attention. We help authors strengthen the long-term discoverability of their books by identifying the audiences most likely to value their work and developing strategies that allow those books to continue reaching readers long after release. We believe meaningful books deserve the opportunity to build lasting readership rather than experiencing only brief moments of visibility.
There is something else that has shaped the way I approach authors over the years. A book is rarely just another publication added to a marketplace. It represents years of imagination, writing, research, revision, and persistence. It becomes part of an author's creative legacy. Long after publication, it continues introducing new readers to an author's voice, opening doors to future works, and preserving stories that may continue shaping how readers understand themselves and the world around them. Some of the most respected literary books are remembered not because they created immediate attention, but because generations of readers continued discovering them. Their stories became enduring contributions rather than temporary releases.
That is why I look at books like yours differently. I do not simply ask whether A Life in Too Many Margins can attract readers today.