The Life of the Mind Review

Tws: abortion, miscarriage

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.

General Impressions

First of all: that cover!! I'm trash for book covers with classic paintings.

The cover make me click on it but it was the synopsis that hooked me and refused to let go: a woman goes through a miscarriage for several days without telling anyone other than her partner.

I finished this book in less than a day and have in mind that this is a book filled with literary and academic references that I was not wholly familiar with. Reading this book reminded me a bit of reading Call Me by Your Name in how reading it never had me thinking about the ending, only the journey the characters were taking me with and Brood because a lot of it was internal and self-contained.

This is definitely one of those books which I'll return to because I think it's one of those reads that teaches you something different, depending on which kind of place the reader is in their lives.

On this first read what stayed with me was that I pitied this main character, not because of her life but because she seemed to have surrounded herself by people that, seeming useful, only took advantage of her and her need to feel connected. The only exception to this I can think of is her partner, whose world I wish I had gotten to see through his eyes because I don't know what to believe when it comes to him: the main character's version, what I think of him after judging through his actions or some other version which we never get access to.

This is a read that will stay with me.

Thank you to Europa Editions for gifting me this proof.

Rating: 4/5