Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingThe Life of the Mind
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreSummary
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, The Atlantic, Electric Lit, Thrillist, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews • 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)
“[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little 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 her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy feel like a failure?
The Life of the Mind is a book about endings—of youth, of ambition, of possibility, but also of the meaning that an inquiring mind can find in the mess of daily experience. Mordant and remorselessly wise, this jewel of a debut cuts incisively into life as we live it, and how we think of it.
Reviews
“One of the wittiest, most deliciously farcical novels I’ve read in a long time.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR, Fresh Air“Smallwood is . . . a delightfully stylish rambler; a conjurer of a heightened, carefully choreographed version of consciousness. Reading her is like watching an accomplished figure skater doing a freestyle routine.”—John Williams, The New York Times
“This book made me laugh out loud.”—The New York Review of Books
“[An] excellent debut.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Hilarious, recognizable, and helplessly wise—a perfect foil for its namesake.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors
“Brilliant and pleasurable, funny and dark, cerebral and visceral—a must-read for the bleeding human survivors of the modern age.”—Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk Fed
“Smallwood’s achievement is to describe, with humor and precision, the affective conditions—what Dorothy’s students might call the ‘vibe’—of a generation living at the end of the end of history but with very little sense of the future.”—Maggie Doherty, The Nation
“Impossibly good, fizzy like a freshly shaken soda can . . . near-perfection. God, can Smallwood write.”—The Believer
“Wholly original, ultra-precise and very funny... the perfect book for anyone who—consciously or not—narrativizes their life, and sometimes gets filled with an overwhelming sense
of dread that they’ve lost the plot.”—Refinery29
“An intellectual page-turner that commands one’s attention completely from the first sentence to the final line. . . urgent, essential reading for our troubling times.”—Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America
“Smart, sharp, often very funny. . . absolutely fearless.”—Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts Expand reviews