This book is…what, exactly? It’s not a novel; it’s not poetry; it’s not a short fiction collection. On paper, it’s an assortment of anecdotes, short dialogues, quotations, and other miscellania, given headings and ordered into an alphabetical index. The letter “B” includes “Body”, “Boredom”, “Bowles, Jane”, and “Breakfast”. “F” has “Feminaissance”, “Fetish”, “Fireworks”, “Flu Shot”, and “Forty”. Yet out of these details emerges a beautifully-crafted picture of the life of the book’s central (and unnamed) character. Even though all we ever get is glimpses, we understand he career, her marriage, her struggle with mental illness, her affair, and her experience of motherhood. It’s also fascinating to experience how this book manages to make clear the extent to which life exists beyond the accumulation of details; it’s possible a understand a lot from a little, but impossible to understand all despite any amount of information.