"Anna, the narrator of this novel with the air of a contemporary Mrs Dalloway, is an editor working under the command of a dictator-like boss and muddles through life as best she can—that is, rather poorly. She resists. She holds things back. She endures. Above all, she remembers.
Caught between a feminist mother with a kind of cheerful dementia, three teenage daughters in the full flush of wokeness, a husband with an evasive smile and fluorescent wardrobe, and a protective barrier of girlfriends sounding the alarm with texts and emergency wine nights to stave off burnout, Anna could scream—as one might in play, or in tears—'Stop everything!' But that only works in the movies.
How do people manage? Why don’t they notice the 'disgusting pigeons with grapefruit bellies' or the cracked melancholy of a woman sitting nearby at the counter? There’s something of a wild Virginia Woolf in this novel about mental load, but also something of Françoise Sagan: each sentence strikes true, folding a disappointing present over a once-enchanted past.

Each sentence cradles, in the comfort of a seemingly bourgeois life, the secrets of the hidden child Anna once was—wounded, sometimes cherished—because every adult is stitched together with the child they once were.
That child wants what we all want: love."