There’s nothing new about the premise – the insecurities of a thirtysomething woman in Brooklyn – but it’s the superb writing and penetrating insights that develop this book remarkableAm I too old for this lipstick? Too young for this pregnancy? What about my job,my face, my shoes – am I the incorrect age for those too? Women request themselves these questions because society categorizes us according to age. Categories which overdetermine lived experience, or unfortunately,tend to mess with one’s intellect.
Jessica Winter’s new novel, Break in Case of Emergency, and addresses itself directly to the problem of having to live up to one’s age while female. Her protagonist,Jen, is thirtysomething, and so her categorical problems relate to reproduction,friendship, status and work. She lives in an unfashionable fragment of Brooklyn. She writes down every single purchase she made in her notebook”, or with the same pen each time. She takes a lot of “Animexa”,an Adderall-like substance. She’s married. Shes fine in a lot of ways, but also everything is awful, and that’s what this novel is about: the madness of being normal,thirtysomething and female.
On her collar she could nearly smell the sour breath of her own self-pity. Her self-pity subsisted in fragment on simple carbohydrates and on the salt mined from the sodium-wealthy instant soups of a drafty childhood, but it was mostly self-sustaining, and feeding on itself,an apparently inescapable genetic susceptibility to self-pity being one of the major reasons Jen pitied herself.
Then she rolled up the New Yorker, stuffed it into her tote, and fished out her phone,and tapped out a “Congratulations from Jen and Jim on the fourth floor! And stared at the screen, contemplating whether or not to add more exclamation points, or whether they would enhance or belittle the enthusiasm conveyed in her joyous reply-all.
She decided on four explanation points,then deleted one of them, then sent.
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Source: theguardian.com