The Life of the Mind is a great read for those who enjoy campus novels with a heavy dose of introspection. The main character, Dorothy, is highly relatable as she struggles to navigate her life and career while dealing with personal trauma. The book's wit and humor provide some much-needed levity, but the real strength of the story lies in its exploration of the human psyche. Overall, The Life of the Mind is a thought-provoking and entertaining read that will stay with you long after you finish it.

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A witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction--"the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney" (Publishers Weekly, starred review)As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with no 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 even her therapists--Dorothy has two of them. Nor can she bring herself to tell the other women in her life: her friends, her doctor, her mentor, her mother. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure?Piercingly intelligent and darkly funny, The Life of the Mind 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. And yet Dorothy's mind is all she has to make sense of a world largely out of her control, one where disaster looms and is already here, where things happen but there is no plot. There is meaning, however, if Dorothy figures out where to look, and as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides, she finds it in the most unlikely places, from a Las Vegas poolside to a living room karaoke session. In literature--as Dorothy well knows--stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.

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