She becomes fixated on creating graphic, sometimes-perverted sexual fantasies between Clee and a multitude of other people.

Cheryl acts out simulations from self-defense DVDs with Clee as self-prescribed therapy for her timidity and globus hystericus burdened throat. Told in Cheryl’s own confiding, unfiltered voice, the novel slides easily between plot and imagination, luring the reader so deeply into Cheryl’s interior reality that the ridiculous inventions of her life become progressively more and more convincing. Afflicted by a host of anxieties, both believable and outrageous, Cheryl keeps her world tightly ordered until Clee, her bosses’ aggressively rude and monstrously provocative daughter, comes to stay in her house and sets off a sequence of fantasies and disasters that violently transform Cheryl’s life. She obsesses over Phillip Bettelheim, a board member of the nonprofit where she works, and the belief that she keeps meeting a familiar, beloved soul embodied in the babies of strangers. In a bizarrely touching first novel, July ( It Chooses You, 2011, etc.) brings the characteristic humor, frankness and emotional ruthlessness of her previous work in film, prose and performance to a larger canvas.Ĭheryl Glickman lives a lonely, precisely arranged life afflicted by mysterious neuroses, including the persistent sensation of a lump in her throat.

The first bad man by miranda july