ORLANDO , Fla. — You could say I’m obsessive about Florida. I’m always talking about it. I write about it constantly. I think about it all day long. It bleeds into everything I do. I live here — I’ve lived here my entire life — and my whole family grew up here. I am steeped in the state. Currently we’re in the midst of hurricane season, a yearly occurrence that runs from June to November. As I started this piece, yet another hurricane was barreling toward the coast . I went to Publix and could barely find a parking space; all the newcomers and tourists were there buying batteries, water, bread. I walked along the frozen section and took advantage of the deals on chicken strips. What it means to live in Florida your whole life is that you get used to things.

I don’t find anything all that interesting about watching my dogs chase around a lizard that has crept inside my home. Yet when I post about it on the internet, people find it strange. “That’s very Florida,” someone replies. Is it really? What makes something quintessentially Central Florida? Is it the bizarre interactions between man and his environment? Or the so-called strangeness of its people, those Weird Florida and Florida Man moments that repeatedly crop up in the news? Does it have more to do with the sticky humidity that layers over everything like jam coating a child’s hands? Florida often gets lumped into one bulk sum in the public imagination : a smashing together of everything that makes up the peninsula, though anyone who lives here can tell you with authority that the Panhandle is not Miami is not the Keys is certainly not Orlando.

Recently, a wave of novels, memoirs and TV shows has set out to get the details and nuances right, especially where it concerns Florida women. In my debut novel, “Mostly Dead Things,” the protagonist, Jessa-Lynn Morton, works in taxidermy, at a family business based in Central Florida. The story concerns grief and loss and love, but also how death and birth feel intrinsically linked in the Sunshine State. Earlier this year came T Kira Madden’s memoir, “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls,” which takes a specific look at young queer girlhood in Boca Raton . Last year, in the story collection “Florida,” Lauren Groff wrote about a Central Florida that focuses more deeply on Ocala and Gainesville, places that have a deep tradition of life lived in the natural environment. Jaquira Diaz’s “Ordinary Girls,” a memoir of growing up in Miami and Puerto Rico , drops this fall .