I became interested in Elisa Albert’s The Book of Dahlia after hearing Albert read the following fragment of a passage on NPR:

This was not a draft for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Though she does wonder what would happen if she wrote to them requesting a three-way. Did they honor those kinds of wishes? Might she find a couple of unemployed porno stars, hung like horses, wearing nothing but giant gift bows and cowboy boots, on her doorstep? And might they then fuck her as though she were healthy? With none of the pity, the god-awful pity?

That’s all I caught, but it was enough to make me pluck The Book of Dahlia from my to-read pile, and I’m really glad I did. My extremely self-referential thoughts on the book follow after the jump.

Dahlia is about a twenty-nine-year-old woman who discovers she has a terminal brain tumor. It's structured as something like a conversation between Dahlia and the advice offered by a cancer self-help book she picks up that encourages her to think positively about her illness; a central theme is Dahlia's unwillingness to let go of her long-held entirely justified anger toward her older brother, even as she gets closer and closer to death. Her anger and general unwillingness to find the bright side of her condition flies in the face of the positive-thinking oriented rhetoric that dominates pop-therapeutic attitudes toward cancer, which urge her to put all that poisonous negativity behind her. Interspersed with this are flashbacks to Dahlia's childhood, the dissolution of her parents' marriage, the cruelties inflicted by her brother, and the exploits of her conventionally debauched 20s.

The book is very misleadingly disguised as chick lit of the brainless summer beach reading variety—the joke of which becomes apparent when the author directly addresses her potential book club audience: "Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck."

Albert is insisting, in other words, that her pink book with the flower on the cover, about a spoiled, self-absorbed, fundamentally useless twentysomething is still important. That the heavy existential shit is worth talking about, even in the context of a precocious hipster girl narrator who lots of readers will probably just hate—so we're going to talk about it, and we're going to smoke a lot of weed and reminisce about past sexual exploits and say the F word while we're doing it. (The obvious debt that Albert's writing owes to Philip Roth that is acknowledged in fairly hilarious fashion in a letter included at the end of the book, addressed to Roth, in which Albert-as-herself proposes to bear his child.)

I realize in some ways it reflects poorly on me to say this, but it's been a while since I've read a book that I identified with as strongly as this one. And while I like to think that I've reached a point where I'm capable of appreciating art that doesn't merely reflect myself back to me (as opposed to overidentifying with Ponyboy and Harriet the Spy)—and also of ferreting out those Big Themes that have nothing to do with the particulars of my own life—there's something incredibly gratifying about having aspects of one's own specific experience articulated by someone else. I'm obviously not dying of a brain tumor—in this case, it's the experience of being a bright, self-interested, slightly neurotic young woman in contemporary US society. For all that there's a glut of frothy, diverting chick lit novels on the market, they have next to nothing in common with the lives of actual women, or specifically, the life of actual me. The boys always get to be the self-reflective overthinkers, gawky antiheroes with inner monologues that just won't quit. Dahlia, finally, is a female protagonist whose inner life is organized around a cerebral, irreverent, and, yes, neurotically self-obsessed, worldview. The book is her, in conversation with herself—not about men, or shoes (ok, not JUST about men and shoes) but about the real facts of her life and what's happening to her. Some of these facts, of course, are female-specific, and another of the book's strengths is Albert's ability to talk about sex and periods and boyfriends in a geniunely fresh and unexpected way, without resorting to the faux-scandalous, oh-girlfriend-no-you-didn't, "I'd rather be home with a vibrator"/"size does matter!"/"sometimes I like a pinky up the butt" insights common to cosmo-lubed girls nights and chick lit confessionals.

In conclusion, it's real good and you should read it. The End.