Christine Smallwood

Christine Smallwood writes fiction, criticism, essays, and cultural reporting with close attention to work, thought, and the language people use to understand themselves. The Life of the Mind, her 2021 debut novel from Hogarth, follows Dorothy, an adjunct English professor in New York City facing academic uncertainty and a recent pregnancy loss that she has told almost no one about. Sessions with two therapists, teaching obligations, and strained relationships unfold beside her effort to interpret what has ended and what remains possible. Smallwood's experience as a magazine writer and literary critic informs the novel's precise observation of institutional life, but Dorothy's bodily and emotional experience repeatedly unsettles the explanations offered by intellect alone.