This book is absolutely batshit crazy, and I loved it. The plot is nominally about a forty-five-year-old woman who decides to drive from LA to New York, but really it's about a crisis of identity that is so strong it causes our narrator to - putting it politely - go off the rails. 

So few books are written about the raw reality of being a mother and a partner, and this one delves deep in a hilarious, outlandish, and compulsively readable way. There are parts of this book that feel so exaggerated and heightened that it almost pulled me out of the narrative, and definitely points where you can tell the author might be going for shock value or the ick factor. But it felt like that was kind of the point: the dramatics helped get across how absolutely earth-shattering it is to undergo menopause and also to just be a woman--especially a middle-aged woman--in a heteronormative patriarchal world. The narrator is never named, which adds to the universality of the story, and although the inside of our protagonist's brain feels extremely disorienting and almost impossibly confused and depressed, she's a really effective articulator and explorer of all the forces in her life that have made her lose her mind. I also appreciated how frank July is about birth trauma, which despite the growing openness about sharing fertility and pregnancy struggles is not talked about as much as it should be.

I love a book that makes me think, and this book had me pausing every few pages to poke my fiance (who is not a reader at all, bless his heart lmao), tell him what was going on in the plot, and muse about what our narrator's antics were making me feel - which was a lot. This one will definitely stick with me.