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Ebook219 pages3 hours
Problems
By Jade Sharma
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
A young woman’s life in New York City is upended by addiction in this debut novel “that is equal parts irreverent and hilarious, depressive and hopeful” (Bustle).
Maya is a young woman with a smart mouth, time to kill, and a heroin hobby that isn’t much fun anymore. She’s been able to get by in New York on her wits and a dead-end bookstore job for years, but when her husband leaves her, and her favorite professor ends their affair, her barely calibrated life descends into chaos.
Maya’s struggle to be alone, to be a woman, and to be thoughtful, imperfect, and alive in a world that doesn’t really care what happens to her is rendered with dead-eyed clarity and unnerving charm. Rendered in frank, graphic, highly charged language where “everything rings true” and “leaves you on a high” (The Guardian), The New York Times exclaimed “a novel about a heroin addict shouldn’t be this much fun to read.”
Maya is a young woman with a smart mouth, time to kill, and a heroin hobby that isn’t much fun anymore. She’s been able to get by in New York on her wits and a dead-end bookstore job for years, but when her husband leaves her, and her favorite professor ends their affair, her barely calibrated life descends into chaos.
Maya’s struggle to be alone, to be a woman, and to be thoughtful, imperfect, and alive in a world that doesn’t really care what happens to her is rendered with dead-eyed clarity and unnerving charm. Rendered in frank, graphic, highly charged language where “everything rings true” and “leaves you on a high” (The Guardian), The New York Times exclaimed “a novel about a heroin addict shouldn’t be this much fun to read.”
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Author
Jade Sharma
Jade Sharma is a writer living in New York. She has an MFA from the New School. Problems is her debut novel.
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Reviews for Problems
Rating: 3.8750000045454542 out of 5 stars
4/5
44 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Problems? I'll say. A junkie who trolls Craigslist for rich men to pimp herself out to because she doesn't seem to have the will or energy to do anything else is neither an appealing character nor a reliable narrator. At least it's not the stereotypical painful childhood molestation/neglect/sibling jealousy/abandonment trauma that sets her on the path to the depths (and no lack of compassion intended to those who have been through that misery- it just seems too familiar a fictional trope lately), but rather ennui, and a desire to reach depths of uselessness. Her half East Asian self is determined to underachieve, and it isn't much fun going with her.There is some cleverness here, just not worthy of an entire novel:"Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, "What? I'm not doing anything."
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5My reading experience was jarring and I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. Sharma's style of writing is a bit disconnected and felt, at times, totally random. While I was interested in Maya, it was hard to keep up with what exactly was going on.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5fascinatingly self-loathing, revelatory, livid, it's good.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'm going to be honest: I decided to sit down and read this one after I heard that the author had passed away. There's something about hearing that an author you haven't yet read has passed that makes you want to figure out what's been lost. "Problems" isn't a perfect novel -- it's obviously a first effort, and it sometimes seems that the author was honing her craft as she was writing it -- but it's got its strong points and suggests that we lost a valuable voice when Jade Sharma died. As a prose stylist, Sharma has her moments, but the writing here varies widely in quality. The novel describes the disintegration of the main character's marriage and an uncomfortable Thanksgiving she spends with her husband's family, but this material feels a bit out of place, and is it's a lot less interesting to read about than her tales of desperation, squalor, and scam artistry, which are the bread and butter of junkie lit. Even so, "Problems" is if nothing else, an astonishingly candid and thrillingly intense piece of writing. We get it all: the narrator's urges, compulsions, anger, sexual fantasies, self-doubt, vanity, aggression, you name it. "Problems" sometimes reads like a Portnoy-level act of psychological striptease. Of course, it's hard not to read "Problems" as a lightly fictionalized autobiography: the author's voice is too raw, and the details she includes too specific, to come from "Intervention" reruns. In a way, this makes "Problems" seem especially daring. The author doesn't just discuss drug use, she also includes the sort of thing that might make her seem less than likable: she's not afraid to write a main character who can occasionally be petty, judgmental, self-indulgent and self-pitying. But this level of psychological honesty also has the effect of laying bare what turn out to be some pretty heavy psychological contradictions. Maya, our main character, constantly craves both power and abasement. She experiences moments of thrilling self-confidence and utter emotional helplessness. We see her criticize others for settling into comfortable careers while she makes a royal mess of her own life. Reading "Problems" feels a lot like watching the author battle her demons right before your eyes. The book's ending is uplifting, which, in a sense, makes the author's early passing even sadder. Somewhere along the line, it seems that she was overcome by the issues she wrote about. But she left a novel that -- who knows? -- might someday be seen as a valuable account of the opioid crisis that swept through the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century. And that's more than enough reason to read this brief, affecting novel. Rest easy, Ms. Sharma.
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