A searing journey through the highs and lows of twenty-first century womanhood from an award-winning journalist beloved for her unflinchingly honest and often comedic appraisals of pop culture, identity, and disillusionment

Adelicious reading experiencelike hearing your smartest friend eviscerate the worst person you know.Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches

Such abrilliantwriter, with so manysurprisingmoves.Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

After a brief fling with corporate stability in her twenty-something cis era, Harron Walker has transitioned into a terminally single freelancer and part-time shopgirl. She’s in the throes of her second adolescence and its requisite daily spirals. She wants it all, otherwise known as: basic human rights, a stable job with good pay and healthcare benefits, someone to love, the ability to feel safe and secure, the pursuit of satisfaction and maybe even contentment. And when she starts to acquire those thingswell, as The Monkey’s Paw famously asked, “What could go wrong?”

In sixteen wholly original essays that blendmemoir, cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and a dash of fanfiction, Walkerplaces her own experiences within the larger context of the pressing and underdiscussed aspects of contemporary American womanhoodthat make up daily life. She recounts an attempt to evisceratea corporation’s attempt at pinkwashing their way into bath bomb sales while simultaneously confronting her pick me impulse to do so. She interrogates her relationship to labor, from the irony of working in a transphobic workplace in order to cover gender-affirming surgeryto the cruel specter of the girlboss that none of us ever think we’ll become. She explores the allure and violence of assimilating into white womanhood in all its hegemonic glory, exposes the ways in which the truth of trans women’s reproductive healthcare is erased in favor of reactionary narratives, and considers how our agency is stripped from usby governments, employers, partners, and ourselvespurely on account of our bodies.

With razor-sharp, biting prose thats as uncompromising as it is playful, Walker grapples with questions of love, sex, fertility, labor, embodiment, community, autonomy, and body fluids from her particular vantagepoint: often at the margins, conditionally at the center.