"In Pirkko's Helsinki, the personal and political are not collapsed but interlinked, and revolution is closely tied with sensuality. Idealistic young people rush, disguised in drab overcoats, to secret locations where coded knocks allow them inside to discuss the hot political topics of the day. And then, in those back rooms, private identities bloom... Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio's work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen."
--Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A beautifully rendered portrait of a strikingly queer life--Saisio troubles any distinction we might try to draw between the personal and the political, the remembered and the invented."
--Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere

"This Red Book of Farewells is also a book of welcoming: to life, to love, to death, to art, to revolution, to our ever-changing identities. It is hilarious and heartbreaking and like nothing I've ever read before."
--Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra