Do the Wrong Thing

Trouble Girl follows Ava Mueller through high school and university. She fights with her mom, searches desperately for friendship and belonging, then a teacher tells her she can write. "Writers, artists - they're not real people," she thinks. "They live outside society. They don't follow rules - oh, Mom will never allow that." Yet Ava doesn't fit in anywhere. At university, she works hard towards self-sufficiency, shooting bullets into her own feet every step of the way. The resulting chronicle is both funny and heartbreaking. When we meet Ava at the beginning of the Do the Wrong Thing serial, she stutters through a description of her suicide attempt. "I don't know why I did it," she says. "It was mundane, like brushing my teeth." Once she starts talking, she can't stop, placing one memory after the other in a parade of isolated incidents that don't seem to connect. If you like Knausgaard, Ferrante, and Rachel Cusk, you'll love this Gen X Proust.