Margie Sarsfield's BETA VULGARIS

Elise fantasized about being the kind of adult she'd needed as a teenager, which felt a little pathetic, veering too close to "inner child" territory. Realistically, Elise could not be trusted with anyone's heart, not even her own.

Elise woke up with a thirst like she was a Russian doll and each of the selves inside her needed their own gallon of water to recover.

Elise had failed, miserably to learn every lesson, and she hated herself for it. She wanted to be the perfect person for everyone, and she'd never once gotten close. There were too many other fucked-up up versions of herself hanging out inside her, no room for the one true and flawless Elise to be born.

I don't think I've ever highlighted as many blocks of text in my ebook reader as I have in Margie Sarsfield's bizarre and brilliant novel, Beta Vulgaris, the chronicle of a young Millennial woman whose dreams of being able to support herself in a post-2008 United States mock her at every turn, and whose undergraduate education as a philosophy major and a lifetime of psycho-sexual anxiety and eating disorders have left her painfully and chronically self-aware, and whose current state of economic and social precarity has led her and live-in boyfriend Tom to the perfectly logical conclusion that their best move in the coming months is to leave their groovy Brooklyn life for a while, sublet their apartment to a friend/relative, and travel to faraway, exotic Minnesota and temporary employment as menial labor bringing in a massive and only sort-of industrialized sugar beet harvest. It pays really well, better than either of their current day jobs, and it should provide the kind of hipster credit and anecdote fodder beloved of their milieu, while also giving them a kind of rhetorical bludgeon to use on their elders, who just don't seem to understand just how dire their economic situation and prospects really are. And never mind that Tom is actually a trust fund baby who is getting ready to go to law school on his parents' dime. He's got his darned pride.

Elise, meanwhile, is generally struggling. The kind of struggling that she feels is unique to her age group but hey, I, too remember spending entire months walking six miles to and from work each day until my job decided to spring for monthly T passes for employees,and carefully rationing leaves off the head of lettuce that represented a week's groceries because I had stupidly splurged on a Ranma 1/2 VHS tape on pay day all those weeks ago, and having to pass up the really good temp jobs (before one of my temp jobs hired me as a permanent worker) because I couldn't afford the right clothes for the kind of office that would otherwise hire me based on my skills but not if I showed up in a fraying khaki skirt and a knit top that was beginning to pill because the dryers at my nearest coin-op laundry really sucked and [your own memory of twenty-something poverty here]. Elise's struggles have been my struggles, is what I'm saying, and if I'd had a groovy boyfriend with reliable cross-country transportation (aka a working car) when I was her age, I, too, might have chosen a season as a temporary agricultural worker of some kind. I might have made quite a few of the wacky choices (including, sometimes, choosing not to choose in the hope that a particular problem or two might just resolve itself or go away) she makes in the course of Beta Vulgaris. I might, too, have heard the sugar beets singing each to each, and thought that they were singing to me. Your mileage may vary.