Tory Henwood Hoen Books in Order

Tory Henwood Hoen grew up in Connecticut, studied at Brown University, spent a few years in Paris, and then lived in New York City for about fifteen years. Long before she published a novel, she was building a life around words.

After college, Hoen worked at a communications agency, then at magazines, and later in the fashion and startup world. She spent five years at M.M. LaFleur, where she served as creative director of brand and founded the company's digital magazine, The M Dash. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Bon Appétit, Fortune, and other publications.

Fiction was the long game.

She has said she wanted to write a novel for years, but fear kept getting in the way. By her mid-thirties, the frustration of not trying had started to feel worse than the risk of failing. Burned out and ready for a change, she left her job, lined up freelance work, and gave herself the time and structure to see whether she could finish a draft at all.

That leap led to The Arc, her debut novel, published in February 2022. Hoen has described the spark for the book in very modern terms: after a breakup, she started using dating apps for the first time and kept wondering why the whole system felt so flimsy. From that question came a high-concept love story about Ursula Byrne, a Manhattan branding executive who signs up for a secretive matchmaking service that claims it can find the person she is most compatible with. Readers who click with the book often like that mix of satire and sincerity. It pokes fun at startup culture and the urge to optimize everything, but it also takes love seriously.

Then she swerved.

Her second novel, Before I Forget, published in December 2025, moves away from urban dating and into family care, memory, and homecoming. The book follows Cricket Campbell, a 26-year-old who returns to the Adirondacks to help care for her father after his Alzheimer's diagnosis. Hoen has spoken openly about her own father's illness, and about watching her mother handle the daily reality of caregiving, so the novel grows out of experience even as it takes imaginative turns. It became a December 2025 Book of the Month selection and a Reader's Digest Book Club pick.

Across both books, Hoen seems interested in people who look functional on the outside but feel unmoored on the inside. Her characters are often adults in transition, trying to sort out work, identity, love, family, and the stories they tell themselves about who they are. She likes a sharp social setup, but she does not stop there. The emotional question matters just as much as the premise.

There are small human details in the way she talks about writing, too. She has said that she often begins with morning pages to clear out the nerves, and that a tiny wooden wolf helps signal when it is time to stop stalling and start. It is a funny image, but it fits the larger pattern: Hoen does not wait around for inspiration to become pure or perfect. She builds rituals, does the work, and keeps moving.

She now lives in Vermont with her daughter and two cats. That quieter setting feels in step with her work, which is observant, emotionally alert, and drawn to the messy point where reinvention stops being an idea and becomes a real life.