EBOOK
About
Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.
It's a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.
Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she's free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It's all of humanity-grim, funny, and desperate-wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.
NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.
• A sensitive examination of grief, especially in an ambivalent marital situation. (how do you mourn somebody you didn't really like?)
• This book is very funny, including send-ups of the kind of communities/cultures that spring up online. Fan culture (re: soap opera and the police message boards/true crime, etc.)
• Engaging with AI, and when the human and the machine are blurred.
"Three days ago I didn't know Sarah Mintz existed; now I want to know where the hell she's been all my reading life. (Canada, apparently.) NORMA is a spiky, apothegmatic wonder written in laser-guided prose. It's a very funny book about grief, prurience, and anger, as resonant and memorable as it is brief and bizarre. Now that I know Mintz is out there, I'll read anything and everything she writes."-Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
"Sarah Mintz is a writer who knows what's going on. Using language like a fire escape, NORMA is a sublime farrago that enlivens the slow shock of aging, sees into and speaks from all the various places we live, and also don't live: our bodies, the stores just down the block, our mind-resistant brains. This is part telenovela, part Beckettian mumble and scavenger hunt and data stream. Always compassionate, and with such intelligence and strange beauty, NORMA captures our moment and will live beyond it."-Michael Trussler, author of The History Forest
It's a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.
Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she's free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It's all of humanity-grim, funny, and desperate-wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.
NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.
• A sensitive examination of grief, especially in an ambivalent marital situation. (how do you mourn somebody you didn't really like?)
• This book is very funny, including send-ups of the kind of communities/cultures that spring up online. Fan culture (re: soap opera and the police message boards/true crime, etc.)
• Engaging with AI, and when the human and the machine are blurred.
"Three days ago I didn't know Sarah Mintz existed; now I want to know where the hell she's been all my reading life. (Canada, apparently.) NORMA is a spiky, apothegmatic wonder written in laser-guided prose. It's a very funny book about grief, prurience, and anger, as resonant and memorable as it is brief and bizarre. Now that I know Mintz is out there, I'll read anything and everything she writes."-Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
"Sarah Mintz is a writer who knows what's going on. Using language like a fire escape, NORMA is a sublime farrago that enlivens the slow shock of aging, sees into and speaks from all the various places we live, and also don't live: our bodies, the stores just down the block, our mind-resistant brains. This is part telenovela, part Beckettian mumble and scavenger hunt and data stream. Always compassionate, and with such intelligence and strange beauty, NORMA captures our moment and will live beyond it."-Michael Trussler, author of The History Forest