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"A New York Times, Times Magazine, LitHub and White Review Best Book of 2021.'Calling all millennials - this is the comic novel for you.' - The TimesThe 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.'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"