“[A] jewel of a debut... abundantly satisfying.” — Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker. As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little 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 her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy feel like a failure? The Life of the Mind is a book about endings—of youth, of ambition, of possibility...
Publisher: Hogarth (March 15, 2022) Pages: 240 pages ISBN-10: 0593229916 ISBN-13: 978-0593229910 ASIN: B089S783LS
Click on the image to read the book
Christine Smallwood is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, Vice, The New Yorker, Bookforum, T, and many other magazines. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University. The Life of the Mind is her first novel.