Then I read James Baldwin and was swept away by it. “The Mary Renault books that I read were a big help.

“A book like this one would have made life much easier when I was a teenager,” he says. With it, Grimsley has written the kind of book that might have eased his fraught coming-of-age as a gay man from the rural South. No spoilers, but suffice it to say “Dove” has a happy ending, for a change. One function of creating your own world in a novel is that you can save yourself. “It’s written for the YA market, but I hope older readers of all backgrounds will respond to the storytelling and recognize those heady feelings of first love,” Grimsley says in a phone interview from his home in Goldsboro, North Carolina.