000			02541cam a22003738i 4500
001			on1157930671
003			OCoLC
005			20210316120619.0
008			200730s2021 enk 000 1 eng
010			_a 2020022737
040			_aDLC _beng _erda _cDLC _dOCLCO _dLIV _dFSP _dNFG
019			_a1238031386
020			_a9780593229897 _q(hardcover)
020			_a0593229894
035			_a(OCoLC)1157930671 _z(OCoLC)1238031386
042			_apcc
092			_aSMALLWOO _bCHRISTIN
049			_aNFGA
100	1		_aSmallwood, Christine, _d1981- _eauthor.
245	1	4	_aThe life of the mind : _ba novel / _cChristine Smallwood.
250			_aFirst edition.
263			_a2103
264		1	_aLondon ; _aNew York : _bHogarth, _c[2021]
300			_a229 pages ; _c22 cm
336			_atext _btxt _2rdacontent
337			_aunmediated _bn _2rdamedia
338			_avolume _bnc _2rdacarrier
520			_a"As an adjunct professor of English with a draining and tedious courseload, Dorothy feels "like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had no idea what else to do but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise." No one but her partner knows that she's just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists--Dorothy being the kind of person who begins seeing a second because she's too conflict-averse to break things off with the first. It's not so much that Dorothy is ashamed of the miscarriage itself as she is of the sense of purpose the prospect of motherhood had provided, of how much she'd wanted it. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure? (That's another thing she's ashamed of.) The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of aspirations, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet our minds are all we have to make sense of a world largely out of our control--which is to say our world; a world where things happen, but there is no plot. And so Dorothy must make do with what she has, as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides. Often witty and consistently alive to how stories end and begin again, The Life of the Mind is a moving, darkly funny, and starkly original examination of how life, as they say, goes on"-- _cProvided by publisher.
650		0	_aWomen college teachers _vFiction. _960667
650		0	_aMiscarriage _vFiction. _9148952
655		7	_aPsychological fiction. _2lcgft _9833
655		7	_aNovels. _2lcgft _92408
994			_aC0 _bNFG
999			_c326478 _d326478