Bills Fandom, Abortion Rights and One Debut Novel: Caitríona Moran's Case for Delusional Hope

Caitríona Moran publishes a debut novel this week, and the essay explaining why it exists opens not with publishing but with the Buffalo Bills. "There's Always Next Year: What the Buffalo Bills Taught Me About Writing and Hope," posted on LitHub, makes a single argument: sustaining belief against evidence is a trainable skill, and fandom is where Moran trained it.

The essay's spine is autobiography. Moran was born into Bills fandom in Western New York in the very late eighties — a family photograph shows Moran's father in a Bills sweatshirt holding two-day-old Moran in a hospital, a Bills-branded cooler of Miller Lite just out of frame. The team, with Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas and Bruce Smith, was about to make four consecutive Super Bowl appearances. It lost all four, a feat unmatched in NFL history. A seventeen-season playoff drought followed, spanning Moran's middle school through early adulthood.

Moran names the losses the way poets name things: Hail Murray, Twelve Men, Wide Right, the Music City Miracle, Thirteen Seconds — the 2022 Divisional playoff defeat in which Josh Allen's team squandered a lead with thirteen seconds left. Watching Allen sit on the sidelines, helmet still on, "felt like getting kicked in the head by a horse for eternity."

What does losing teach a writer?

The essay's pivot is blunt: "Well, that is also what it feels like to publish a book." Moran separates writing — "a joy," even its bad parts — from publishing, with its rejections, silences, advance comparisons and the pressure to shrink a novel into a social-media peapod. The Bills prepared Moran for that bargain. "But here is where being a Bills fan works to my advantage: who cares about humiliation!"

The claim has a factual backdrop the essay does not soft-pedal. Bills safety Damar Hamlin medically died on the field during a 2022 game. Three weeks before publication, the Atlantic dubbed the Bills "The Most Cursed Team in American Sports." The team has been blamed, in Moran's wry accounting, for both the Oklahoma City bombing and Donald Trump's presidency.

The novel inside the argument

The book at the center of the essay, "The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow," follows a scholar and healer who moonlights as her city's only abortion provider. She opens the story as a political prisoner and ends it on trial for her life. Moran did not intend to write her as an optimist. Late 2016 offered, in Moran's words, soil that was not "fertile" for hope, and the reproductive justice landscape has only darkened.

The essay grounds that darkness in specifics: Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider, was gunned down in his kitchen thirty miles from where Moran lived as a child. Post-Roe, at least two U.S. abortion providers face extradition to states where abortion is illegal for prescribing medication. A recent report estimates over 900 women have been charged with crimes relating to pregnancy loss since the ruling. Multiple women have died after being refused life-saving abortions by hospitals fearing prosecution.

Moran describes the day Roe fell — a damp, quiet protest in Union Square, older women holding signs from pre-Roe marches — and a year spent as a clinic escort in Queens, walking patients past protesters who filmed and harassed them to tears. "Any empathy I could have had for them burned to the ground inside of me." The hope that survived was, Moran writes, "a kind of grim spite. Sometimes, that is hope."

Hope as practice

The essay's working thesis arrives late: big impossibilities — a government believing in the fundamental humanity of half the population — require rehearsal on small ones, like a championship or a first book. "I think of it as a series of delusional inoculations against hopelessness, each one increasing in strength and intensity."

The evidence Moran offers is modest and dated to the moment of writing: the Bills have started the season 7-1, and the candle tradition Moran shares with a best friend has escalated from jaunty buffaloes scented "a Bills victory" to a Josh Allen prayer candle to this year's label — "This Has Got to Be the Season, So Help Me God."

What does this change for readers? Not the odds — the Bills remain the Bills. What Moran offers is a method: treat hope as repetition, not mood. The closer is characteristically spare. "And if this year isn't the year? I'll still be here. It's the only choice. There's always next year."

"The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow" by Caitríona Moran is available from G.P. Putnam's Sons.