Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick Review
- Joao Nsita
- 6 hours ago
- 10 min read
Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick Review — A Funny, Tender, and Deeply Human Story About Love, Anxiety, and Saying Yes
There are books that make you laugh, and then there are books that make you laugh so hard you snort, stop, look around the room like you have to confess something to nobody, and then go right back to reading. Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick is the second kind. It is the kind of debut novel that comes bursting out of the gate with so much warmth and self-awareness that you find yourself thinking: where has this writer been all my reading life?
I picked up this book on a Tuesday afternoon when the world felt a little grey. By Tuesday night, I was texting people about it. By Wednesday morning, I had recommended it to no fewer than five human beings. That says everything.
Here is the thing about Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It — it is not just a rom-com, though it absolutely is a rom-com. It is a book about anxiety. About the way that one humiliating moment can calcify inside you and shape every choice you make for years afterward. About the desperate, sometimes hilarious, always relatable experience of feeling behind some invisible timeline that nobody actually agreed to but everyone pretends is real. Phoebe Berman is nearly thirty and has never had sex. That is the premise. But the soul of this book is so much richer and more complicated and more true than that one sentence can possibly suggest.
Brooke Averick — best known for her wildly popular podcast — has written a debut that reads like it was written by someone who has spent years listening to people talk honestly about love, intimacy, and the many ways anxiety can quietly wreck a perfectly good thing. Which, of course, she has. The result is something rare: a romance novel that actually feels human.
What This Book Is About
Phoebe Berman is twenty-nine years old and, as the title cheerfully announces, she is about to lose it. Not her mind — though that's up for debate — but her virginity. The book opens with Phoebe, a schoolteacher, confronting the mortifying reality that she has never had sex. Not because she doesn't want to. Not because she hasn't met anyone worth sleeping with. But because every time she gets close to intimacy, her anxiety shows up like a catastrophically bad houseguest and ruins the whole party. It started with a disastrously unfortunate first kiss at fifteen — the kind that ended in vomit, which is apparently all it took to wire Phoebe's nervous system to treat romantic closeness as a full-scale emergency.
So, with her thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon like a lighthouse she can't decide if she's steering toward or away from, Phoebe does what any organised, slightly unhinged romantic would do: she writes a plan. Specifically, a "Guide to Losing My Virginity in Thirty Days." It is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. And it is exactly what sets the rest of this beautiful novel in motion.
What follows is Phoebe suddenly finding herself juggling three very real, very different romantic prospects. There's the gorgeous new fourth grade teacher at her school, all warmth and easy smiles. There's a former high school classmate who resurfaces through a Words With Friends game — yes, really — and whose digital charm makes Phoebe feel things she hasn't felt in a long time. And then there's her roommate. Funny, steady, brilliant, utterly inexplicable. The kind of person who has been right there the whole time, and yet somehow Phoebe has never quite let herself see him clearly.
Averick's genius is in the way she structures this love triangle — or love pentagon, depending on how you count — without ever losing sight of what the book is really about. This is not a book about which man Phoebe chooses. It is a book about Phoebe choosing herself. About learning that intimacy is not a milestone you clear on a checklist. It is something you grow into, slowly, in the presence of people who make you feel safe enough to try. And when Phoebe finally starts to understand that, when she starts seeing herself with the same kindness she extends to everyone else in her life, the romance stops being a plot device and starts being a genuine emotional resolution. A homecoming.
Author's Style and Craft
Brooke Averick writes the way she speaks on her podcast — directly, openly, without artifice. Her prose is breezy but never shallow. She has a gift for comic timing that translates beautifully to the page, knowing exactly when to deliver the punchline and when to let the silence after it breathe. Her dialogue crackles. The scenes between Phoebe and her romantic interests are alive with wit and warmth, and the internal monologue Averick gives Phoebe is a masterclass in making anxiety feel funny and tragic at exactly the same time.
What separates Averick from many debut novelists is her emotional precision. She does not use humour as a shield. She goes to the tender places willingly, and she stays there long enough for the emotion to land. There are scenes in Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It that will make you put the book down and just sit with what you're feeling. That is craft. That is a writer who knows that the joke is only as good as the truth underneath it. Averick's debut is a genuine arrival.
Themes and Deeper Meaning
The central theme of Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It is one that I suspect most readers — regardless of their own experiences — will recognise immediately: the way anxiety rewrites our stories. Phoebe does not simply have a fear of sex. She has a fear of being seen. Of trying and failing. Of being the person in the room who doesn't know what everyone else already seems to know. And rather than examining this from a clinical distance, Averick lives inside it, letting Phoebe's interiority feel vivid and specific and real.
There is also a sharp, tender thread in this novel about the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be "behind." Phoebe has spent years quietly convinced that she is somehow defective — not enough, too late, permanently marked by that first awful kiss. And watching her slowly, painfully dismantle that belief is one of the great pleasures of reading this book. Averick never minimises how hard that dismantling is. She just makes it feel survivable. Joyful, even, in the end.
I think a lot about how this book sits alongside other stories about women and desire that our site has explored. In our review of Score by Kennedy Ryan, we talked about how the best romance novels are actually about healing — about two people becoming braver in the presence of each other. Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It belongs in that conversation absolutely. It is a book that takes intimacy seriously not as a physical act but as an act of courage. And it adds a crucial note to that conversation by centring a woman who has been doing the lonely work of that courage entirely alone, and who finally finds out she doesn't have to. If you loved books like that — stories where the romance is inseparable from the character's interior journey — check out our Romance Book Recommendations page. There are so many wonderful places to go next.
What This Book Gets Absolutely Right
The anxiety is portrayed with extraordinary, unpatronising accuracy. Phoebe's intimacy struggles are never played for pure comedy or reduced to a quirky character trait. They feel real because they are drawn from a real emotional and psychological place, and readers who live with anxiety will feel seen in ways that many books simply do not manage.
The three love interests are all genuinely compelling. Too often in love triangle stories, you know from page one who the right person is and you just wait for the protagonist to catch up. Averick keeps you genuinely uncertain, genuinely invested in each possibility, right up until the moment it resolves. That is hard to do and she does it beautifully.
Phoebe is funny without being a caricature. She is self-deprecating but not self-defeating. She has a specific, delightful sense of humour that feels like it belongs to her rather than being a personality the author draped over a protagonist. This distinction matters more than it sounds.
The friendships are as rich as the romance. Phoebe's relationships with the women in her life are funny and complicated and deeply warm. They do not exist to propel the romance plot. They exist because Phoebe is a full person who needs more than a love interest to feel complete.
The ending earns its emotion. Averick does not rush to resolution. She lets Phoebe sit in her discomfort long enough that when the breakthrough comes, it feels inevitable rather than convenient. The emotional payoff is real because the emotional groundwork is real.
Where the Book Could Have Gone Further
The third act pacing accelerates a little quickly. After a first two-thirds that take their time beautifully, the final section moves at a pace that occasionally feels hurried. A few more scenes in the final stretch would have let the emotional resolution breathe more fully.
The secondary love interests feel slightly underwritten in their final appearances. For characters who are built up with real care for most of the novel, their exits from Phoebe's story happen somewhat efficiently. A little more closure there would have been welcome.
The roommate arc, while satisfying, telegraphs its conclusion a bit early. The moment you meet him, you probably know. And while the journey there is wonderfully written, readers who like a little more genuine uncertainty in their love stories may find the endgame a touch predictable.
Books to Read If You Loved This One
If Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It opened something up for you, here are three books that will keep that feeling alive:
Beach Read by Emily Henry — Another debut that takes the messy interior lives of its characters completely seriously while still being enormously fun to read. Henry and Averick share a gift for making heartbreak funny and funny moments heartbreaking.
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren — A rom-com that puts its heroine in an impossible situation and watches her figure herself out. Sharp, warm, and genuinely romantic in the best way.
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang — A romance that centres a protagonist with neurodivergent experiences navigating intimacy, told with the same honesty and compassion that Averick brings to Phoebe's story. Essential reading.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is for anyone who has ever felt like they were somehow doing life wrong — running late against a clock nobody else can see. It is for readers who want their rom-com with real emotional depth. For anyone who loves a friends-to-lovers slow burn, a chaotic love triangle, or a protagonist who is trying so hard and failing so beautifully and ultimately getting there. It is also — and this matters — a genuinely funny book. If you are in a reading slump, Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It will end it.
If you are looking for more debut romance novels to fall in love with this spring, check out our roundup of 10 Must-Read Romance Books from April 2026 for even more great picks.
Content warnings: anxiety, OCD references, mild sexual content, references to childhood embarrassment, brief discussion of depression.
How This Book Made Me Feel
I want to be honest with you. I read Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It at a time when I needed exactly what it gave me. I needed a book that was funny without being mean. That was about love without being saccharine. That took anxiety seriously without pathologising it. And I needed a protagonist who was deeply, recognisably imperfect in the specific way that real people are imperfect — not because she is broken but because she is human.
Phoebe made me laugh out loud on a public bus. She made me put the book down and stare out the window for a while. She made me think about the stories I carry about myself and whether any of them are actually true. That is not something I expected from a debut rom-com. But that is what I got. And I am grateful.
By the final chapter, I felt that warm, specific fullness you only get from a book that truly understands what it is trying to say. That feeling where you close the last page and you just sit there for a moment, holding it. That is a rare thing. Brooke Averick has done something real here.
Final Verdict
⭐⭐⭐⭐½ — 4.5 out of 5 stars
Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It is the kind of debut that makes you pay attention to an author's name. Brooke Averick writes with wit, warmth, and a genuine understanding of what makes romantic love so terrifying and so worth it. Phoebe is one of the year's great protagonists — messy, funny, real, and ultimately triumphant in exactly the way you were rooting for. This is the perfect beach bag, commute, couch-under-a-blanket book of summer 2026.
About the Author
Brooke Averick is a comedian, content creator, and podcaster best known for her co-hosted podcast Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast, where she speaks candidly and hilariously about her experiences with OCD, anxiety, and depression. She has built a social media following of over 1.5 million across platforms by being fearlessly honest about mental health and everyday life. Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It is her debut novel and a publishing event worth celebrating. Follow her and find out more at brookeaverick.com.
✨ Keep Reading With Us
At ThatLovePodcast.com, we believe every love story deserves to be told. Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly romance reviews, book recommendations, and exclusive content. New here? Start with our Romance Book Recommendations page and find your next favourite read. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and TikTok @thatlovepodcast for daily romance content. Happy reading — and as always, love out loud.
FAQs
1. Is Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It appropriate for sensitive readers? The book contains mild sexual content and themes of anxiety and OCD. It is lighthearted in tone, but readers who find discussions of intimacy anxiety difficult may want to approach with care. Overall, it is a warm, positive read.
2. Is this a standalone novel or part of a series? Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It is a standalone contemporary romance novel. No series commitment required — just pure, satisfying story from beginning to end.
3. How explicit is the romance in this book? The sexual content is present but not graphic. This falls in the warm-to-moderate heat range — romantic and emotionally intimate without being explicit. It is much more focused on emotional connection than physical encounters.
4. Who would most enjoy this book? Readers who love witty, emotionally intelligent contemporary romance — think fans of Helen Hoang, Emily Henry, and Christina Lauren — will feel right at home with Averick's debut. It also strongly appeals to anyone who has navigated anxiety in relationships.
5. Is Brooke Averick's novel based on real events? Averick has spoken publicly about drawing on her own experiences with OCD and anxiety in crafting Phoebe's character. While not strictly autobiographical, the emotional authenticity of the anxiety portrayal reflects her real-life experiences as she has discussed on her podcast.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Comments