The Life of the Mind

***A TIME MAGAZINE, LITHUB, WHITE REVIEW BEST BOOK OF 2021*** '200 pages of serious entertainment.' -The Times The Life of the Mind opens with Dorothy sitting on a library toilet, checking her phone and examining the 'thick, curdled knots of string' coming out of her body. No one but her boyfriend knows that she's had a miscarriage, not even her therapists-Dorothy has two of them. An adjunct professor of English in New York City with no hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy's stuck, unable to envision the future or cut ties with the past. 'What did you call it,' she asks herself, 'when a life stopped developing, but it didn't end?' Christine Smallwood's debut is a campus novel like no other. Piercingly intelligent and darkly hilarious, it moves from a classroom to an underwater puppet show, from a conference in Las Vegas to a karaoke party. It is a discomforting glimpse into the head of a brilliant woman on the edge, it 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.

As a critic, Christine Smallwood is known for her hilarious pieces about Britney Spears, Stephanie Meyer and Werner Herzog. She has written for The New York Times, the New Yorker and Harper's. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and N+1.