Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Vintage for a free digital ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review. 
This story is meandering in a good way. Reminiscent of Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin with its unabashed look into the mind of a mentally ill, neurodivergent queer woman who shares her most shameful thoughts with the reader and her therapist, similarly to I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki or Mr. Robot. As someone who was once diagnosed with depersonalization disorder myself, this was an intensely relatable look at dissociation and how it impacts one’s relationships. I haven’t seen dissociation and depersonalization disorder represented this well in a piece of media ever…except maybe playing the game Night in the Woods? The descriptions of what it feels like to not be present in your body, such as the feeling of being coated in saran wrap, were perfect. The humor is also deeply and darkly funny as the narrator obsesses over minute things that bother her, and I found myself laughing out loud often. The formatting of the story worried me at first with it being prose-like and absent of quotation marks, but I quickly got used to it and it wasn’t confusing. The storytelling method of switching between the author’s real life and her memoir-esque fictional short stories was very effective with the blending of these realities featuring magical realism and horror within the short stories being compared with the horrors and traumas of reality. I would suggest looking through the trigger warnings before reading this if you or someone you know has a history with mental illness and childhood trauma especially. One part towards the end that really hit me hard was this: 
“What Norma meant to say with each metaphor was that her writing was doing what her mind had done for twenty-seven years. Her writing kept her pain at a distance from her. It kept her memories dissociated from her body. It kept her emotions trapped somewhere away from her heart. Writing was her attempt at transplanting her trauma into a character so she didn’t have to hold it. And when she transplanted it, she could edit the trauma the way she so badly wanted to edit her memories. Sometimes the pain was so difficult, she had to write a character who was writing another character.”
Just…damn. A lot of my experiences with trauma and mental illness and weird family dynamics were strikingly similar to Norma’s, so this book really hit me hard and I had to take my time with it. Will this book be what finally makes me go to therapy?