A high-energy, bigtime messy, first-person journey alongside a middle-aged woman in crisis. The author identifies this work as a novel, but it is extremely interior and violently subjective in perspective; I found that in some places it felt strongly like autofiction or transgressive memoir.

The standout experience of reading this for me was the prose. There's the author's casual ways of deconstructing the physical world, or her emotions around her husband's dropped eye contact, or her father's passive suicidality, dashed off with self-indulgence and then capped with a few profound sentences. The narrative is an absolute flood of self-infatuation, horror and justification for every misstep or perceived mistake, sex and sensualism, and everyday perceptions passed off as revelatory. Neither the author nor the character tell the reader how to feel; it's more an experience of getting washed up by a wave of interior monologue and seeing what's in your pockets when you can stand up again. It's a little dizzying and equal parts frustrating and rewarding.

I guess some of the same things could be said of perimenopause, which is a significant theme in the character's journey. I'm not convinced that the character's crisis (crises!) must be specifically hormonal and not simply endemic to her personality, but this added dimension felt true-to-life in terms of the constant questioning and recontextualizing I've found myself experiencing during this phase of my life. Amongst all the drama, I found some very familiar kernels of worry and distress, and some beautiful moments to balance these.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes an ethically challenging main character, a woman desperately wrestling against expectations instilled by the patriarchy, or a two-step slide to the left of sexual vanilla.