Published in 2017
304 pages
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody is Ever Missing and The Answers, both of which has been translated into Italian, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish. She is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award, a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and a NYFA fellow. Her essays and short fiction have been published in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. In 2017 Granta named her a Best Young American Novelist. Her first short story collection Certain American States was published inn 2018. She was born in Mississippi and is based in Chicago.
What is this book about?
An urgent, propulsive novel about a woman learning to negotiate her ailment and its various aftereffects via the simulacrum of a perfect romantic relationship
In Catherine Lacey’s ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the “Girlfriend Experiment,” the brainchild of an eccentric actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship—even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the “Emotional Girlfriend”—certainly better than the “Anger Girlfriend” or the “Maternal Girlfriend”—and is pulled into Kurt’s ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection.
Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey. It is a gorgeous hybrid of the plot-and the idea-driven novel that will leave you reeling.
