Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. Better and better! The narrator is an L. Also like July, she is queer and married to a man, a fellow creative type, raising a nonbinary child.
She is haunted by literal and metaphorical death. Her child was almost stillborn. But while the narrator is ruminating on the death-in-life that looms for women when they run out of estrogen, she is, for what she fears is a limited time only, hornier than a teenage boy.
She masturbates, over the course of the novel, approximately ten times, has sex nine times, and at one point experiences an exquisite moment of intimacy when someone else removes her bloody tampon. I liked her quirky, character-driven movies fine.
I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible. The tension that propels the book becomes: Can the narrator avoid destroying her marriage and her relationship with her kid while still pursuing the total sexual and creative freedom that her countdown clock requires? And if so, how? Having that kind of sex seems permanently outside her grasp, not destined to happen in this lifetime.
She seems poised to do something that will change her life, the kind of thing we expect to happen in New York, which is traditionally a great place to try on a new persona or have a meaningless affair. But, instead, she stops the car 30 miles outside of L. There, she spends the whole 20 grand redecorating her motel room completely, redoing the wallpaper and lighting, transforming it into a perfect feminine oasis that smells like tonka bean.
