Christine Smallwood

This was one book I really, really didn’t get, so I’m staying away from rating it.

If you were not aware, academic institutions maintain some of their brightest students in a form of indentured slavery.

These graduates teach undergraduates a few courses and earn just barely enough to live in a closet with their likewise underpaid lovers, or maybe in their mom’s trailer.

They don’t get benefits. They don’t get tenure. And they sure don’t get rich.

This book is a satire of the bitter bitchiness between the poor sods who compete for deck chairs on the Titanic of academic richesse, and a swipe at the loathsome right who declare women’s reproductive rights non-existent.

Smallwood gets pretty graphic in depicting women who have performed homestyle births and abortions, almost as though the abortions are metaphors for their dead end intellectual careers.

I’d have to go back to the 18th century to find another book written by man or woman to compare with this brazen scatological humour. Or possibly just back to John Barth’s Fieldingesque bildungsroman, The Sot-Weed Factor.

Psychoanalysis plays a very big role in this story, for after all, anybody who accepts this life ought to have her head read.

And I highly advise reading this book after breakfast. You’ll thank me.… (meer)

Dorothy is an adjunct professor of English who is going though a miscarriage. She is ungrounded and haunted by her lack of progress and her tendency to measure herself against other women grad students and her mentor.
I thought the book was funny and frank, especially when she mentions things about her body that you normally think of as gross. She quotes lots of literary idols, sometimes to the detriment of the story, as they are not well integrated and seem like interruptions.
Lauren Berlant "cruel optimism" seems to define her life--people who remain attached to fantasies and aspirations of the good life.--stuckness
She has a lot to say about time "Life was increasingly filled with melancholy sounds like this, digital reproductions or replacements of analog sounds, reminders of historical periods gone by, One day these digital tones would not be heard in reference to the past."
Of the book Learning From Las Vegas, she owned but never read "It was just another false start, another purchase toward the identity of a person she had turned out not to be." Reminds me of all the art books I've purchased and never read.… (meer)

This book ended up on many best of the year lists. It also seemed like an interesting topic. Dorothy is an adjunct teacher who is not having success getting a permanent position. She also just had a miscarraige that continues to cause bleeding etc. No one except her partner Rog knows that she was even pregnant. This is the backdrop to the book. It takes place in her head where Dorothy analyzes every little thing. She is always worried about her actions and it is no surprise that she is seeing 2 therapists with 2nd being used for Dorothy to talk about the first. What makes this book so good is Dorothy is very funny and her comments remind me of an excellent stand up comedian telling funny stories. The book was 240 pages so it is one you can stick with. I don't think I would have enjoyed 400 pages of Dorothy but at 240 it was okay. Good insights into academia and the competition for jobs and books etc. This was debut novel and I look forward to her next one.… (meer)