A neu­rot­ic par­ty girl’s com­ing-of-age mem­oir about learn­ing to live before get­ting ready to die. Tara has it pret­ty good: a nice job, a writ­ing career, a for­giv­ing boyfriend. She should be hap­py. Yet Tara can’t stay sober. She’s ter­ri­ble at monogamy. Even her psy­chi­a­trist grows sick of her and stops return­ing her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, bare­ly pulling things off, and feel­ing sick and tired. Then, in the autumn fol­low­ing her twen­ty-sev­enth birth­day, an abnor­mal lump dis­cov­ered in her left breast serves as the cat­a­lyst for a jour­ney of rig­or­ous self-ques­tion­ing. Wait­ing on a diag­no­sis, she begins an intel­lec­tu­al assess­ment of her life, des­per­ate to jus­ti­fy a short exis­tence full of dumb choic­es. Armed with her phi­los­o­phy degree and angry deter­mi­na­tion, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by and winds up writ­ing a sear­ing­ly hon­est mem­oir about learn­ing to live before get­ting ready to die.