**Blazingly intelligent, wickedly funny, and piercingly honest, a memoir that captures the perils and pleasures of girlhood, womanhood, and life itself.

“One of my favorite books of the last few years.” —Cheryl Strayed

“Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of.” —The Atlantic**

At mid-life, Claire Dederer developed a sudden yearning for jailbreak. In this exuberant memoir, she reflects on two periods in her life uncannily similar in their emotional intensity: her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of unruly and mysterious new hungers, and her recollections of herself as a teenager.