The 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.