“[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
A
witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a
brilliant new voice in fiction—“the glorious love child of Ottessa
Moshfegh and Sally Rooney” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
As
an adjunct professor of English in New York City with no hope of
finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the
temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who
had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No
one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage, not even
her therapists—Dorothy has two of them. Nor can she bring herself to
tell the other women in her life: her friends, her doctor, her mentor,
her mother. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of
feminism. So why does she feel like a failure?
Piercingly intelligent and darkly funny, The Life of the Mind
is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of
possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the
tyranny of our bodies. And yet Dorothy’s mind is all she has to make
sense of a world largely out of her control, one where disaster looms
and is already here, where things happen but there is no plot. There is
meaning, however, if Dorothy figures out where to look, and as the weeks
pass and the bleeding subsides, she finds it in the most unlikely
places, from a Las Vegas poolside to a living room karaoke session. In
literature—as Dorothy well knows—stories end. But life, as they say,
goes on.
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