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Even the books within her books often function as self-help for her characters, regardless of actual genre.

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She adopts who cares?

as a personal catchphrase, a line cribbed from a self-help book.

Yes, the coins say.

Is there anything I can do to avoid being that way?

What would it mean then to evaluate her newest novel,Pure Colour, likewise?

Maybe so, but who cares?

God is readying for a second stab at this whole thing.

Lastly, there are bears, who claim a few people to love and protect and hold on tight.

Every scene unfolds like a dream sequence.

The plot revolves around Mira, an aspiring art critic born of the bird egg.

The school is pretentious and strange, its students stood on desks, declaiming.

Mira meets and falls in love with another student, an American orphan named Annie.

(Confusing given that she is American, unless that is the joke.)

Yet Mira does not torture herself over memories of phone calls cut short or unpaid visits home.

She had left behind the traditional and warm values she had known, she thinks, and for what?

A difficult life on the knife-edge of feelings, since thats what being an art critic meant.

For art is not made for living bodiesit is made for the cold, eternal soul, Mira thinks.

Like many in the throes of grief, Mira is sure that other people made better choices.

She spends weeks just playing the jewel game on her phone.

A tree catches her eye.

She pulls one of its leaves to her face.

(Mira is in that leaf for a while.

I also found their ruminations on morality helpful?

Her dad replies, So you want to return to earth to google yourself?

Who is the she here?

I do not know that we can assume that is Mira.

I think she is the author of this first draft of existence.

I think she is Heti.

Its strangeness might tire readers used to Hetis more grounded and linear fiction.

The reward is that you could actually emerge feeling better.

That is strangely true and weirdly comforting.

Everyone is already doing that.

Theyre just doing it in secret.

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