"Fence Modern Prize-winner Hilary Plum's piercingly funny, dark, and furious post-Dobbs protest novel--the story of an abortion clinic secretary's bodily strike against the laws that shutter her workplace. A former state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a low level secretary at an abortion clinic in the wake of a new heartbeat law when her boss is arrested, and the clinic shut down, for providing off-the-book procedures to patients in need. Work was Angela's lifeline. With both everything and nothing left to lose, she decides to protest her boss's arrest by going on a hunger strike in the boarded up clinic. She considers this a practical use of her "skillset": the masochistic discipline of a champion runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary). Angela's protest is impulsive, furious, and disorganized, but it mobilizes a group of people around her: an ex who is a local journalist, a doctor who cares for her during her strike, an aunt who serves on the city council, her former coworkers, and above all a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine. Dark, lucid, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric of concern to explore the role abortion care plays in the lives of real people, what access means on a day-to-day basis, and the ways we are, for better and worse, responsible for one another"--
