Los Angeles Times Bestseller
-Mary Cappello 's] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . is] revelatory indeed.- --MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
-A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.- --SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger
Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello...

Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on.

This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You don't write that book as a linear progression--you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially, active, investigation. Or at least you do if you're as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello.

What...