The Life of the Mind

'Calling all millennials - this is the comic novel for you.' - 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, 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.

'A jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.' - Jia Tolentino

'This book made me laugh out loud; its pages are marked by a snorting ungenerous glee that is at times indistinguishable from despair.' - The New York Review of Books