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Summary
Summary
Dark, raw, and very funny, Problems introduces us to Maya, a young woman with a smart mouth, time to kill, and a heroin hobby that isn't much fun anymore. Maya's been able to get by in New York on her wits and a dead-end bookstore job for years, but when her husband leaves her and her favorite professor ends their affair, her barely-calibrated life descends into chaos, and she has to make some choices. Maya's struggle to be alone, to be a woman, and to be thoughtful and imperfect and alive in a world that doesn't really care what happens to her is rendered with dead-eyed clarity and unnerving charm. This book takes every tired trope about addiction and recovery, "likeable" characters, and redemption narratives, and blows them to pieces.
Emily Books is a publishing project and ebook subscription service whose focus is on transgressive writers of the past, present and future, with an emphasis on the writing of women, trans and queer people, writing that blurs genre distinctions and is funny, challenging, and provocative.
Jade Sharma is a writer living in New York. She has an MFA from the New School.
Author Notes
Jade Sharma: Jade Sharma is a writer living in New York. She has an MFA from The New School.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sharma's debut novel is an uncompromising and unforgettable depiction of the corrosive loop of addiction. Maya is a young woman living in New York with her husband, Peter. She has an afterthought of a job at a bookstore, is sleeping with a former professor, and regularly does heroin. Following a trip to Peter's parents' house for Thanksgiving, during which Maya tries to stop using, Peter leaves her ("You make me feel like an employee," he says to her) and the professor breaks off their affair. Maya's not-very-happy life descends further, becoming a cycle of sleeping with Internet strangers for drug money, attempting to quit, and then resuming. Sharma structures the novel in short bursts of prose, alternately jumping around or lingering in a scene. Despite the floaty plot, there is a propulsive energy in Maya's story, guided by her askew yet precise perspective: "This is the way heroin addiction works: You take four classes thinking you will keep yourself busy, but then you mess it up because you're always high... And so then, what's the point of getting clean? To return to a mostly empty life?" Some readers may find the subject matter too difficult, but in Maya's voice, Sharma has crafted a momentous force that never flags and feels painfully honest. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The sardonic story of one woman's eating disorder and drug abuse. Maya, the appealing protagonist of this aptly titled debut novel, is not OK. Her husband, Peter, is an alcoholic; her mother is dying of multiple sclerosis; her late father gave her no attention or affection while he was alive; she is having an affair with a comparably unloving father figure, her professor; she has been unable to get pregnant, despite desperately wanting a child; she is anorexic, living on, at most, 400 calories' worth of peach yogurt a day; and, on top of all this, or maybe because of it, she's been regularly using heroina "chipper"since she was 18. At first, Maya tries to keep her habit minimal, never using more than three days in a row. But when Peter leaves her, those boundaries vanish; she thinks to herself, "Just be a junkie now." To earn money for drugs, she cruises Craigslist for men willing to pay for dates and intimate encounters. And so begins a cycle of varyingly violent sex, extreme heroin use, and lost days. The ease of such a life leaves little motivation to stop. "Also," she writes, "I wasn't thin and blond. I could have cleaned up if I was." In graceful prose, the narrator recounts the hours spent high: "Sounds folded back into the world, moving on, light-years from the living room where I lay around, hardly living." The novel is written so well that the relentless and destructive rhythm of heroin abuse seems calming, metaphysical, and occasionally even funny. Sharma's descriptions are vivid and sage"Sometimes it felt like there was blackness underneath everything. Like a Rothko painting, how the blackness bleeds through"lulling readers into a similarly opiate state to which they will readily succumb and from which, like the protagonist, it will take some time to recover. An absorbing novel carried by a seemingly hopeless protagonist you will want to befriend and save. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
A NOVEL ABOUT a heroin addict shouldn't be this much fun to read. In Jade Sharma's debut, "Problems," the narrator, Maya, has many: her addiction, failing marriage, failing affair, nonexistent master's thesis, expiring job and eating disorder. She offends her conservative in-laws. She fights with her mom, who is widowed and dying of M.S. Sharma counteracts these dark problems with Maya's funny, quirky, clever narrative style. Instructions for snorting heroin are imagined in the voice of the cooking-show hosts Bobby Flay ("What you want to do is get the heroin as finely minced as possible") and Rachael Ray ("And you don't have to use a dollar bill. That's what my husband likes, so that's what we use at my house. ... One time, I couldn't find anything, and so I tore a page out of a book! Whatever works for you!"). Maya invents reviews for her lover's ex-girlfriend's book: "'Finally all the drug cliché memories, put in a blender and into one book.' - New York Times"; "'Another piece of garbage written by a privileged white woman with too much time on her hands....' - Everyone who has ever read it." Maya quotes her future kid: "My mom is so cool. She smokes pot with me, and she's always encouraging me to do whatever I want," and refers to strangers as extras: "It was as if God had put extras on a bus to remind me what a brat I was." As her marriage to Peter unravels, Maya tells the story of their relationship. She assigns numbers to conversations: "Excerpt from conversation 56,543, Peter to me: 'You don't understand why it makes me feel bad that you asked me not to speak when Benedict Cumberbatch is on television?"' She wonders if there's a correlation between Peter buying himself "crappy stuff" and his choosing an Indian-American woman like her: "a thrifty, generic brown one instead of a name-brand white one with blond hair. He had rummaged through the bin and said, 'This brown one will do. It has all the same parts as the white one.'" After Maya's lover breaks up with her, Sharma writes what should become a modern adage: "Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, 'What? I'm not doing anything.'" Most of "Problems" takes place in Maya's head. And if you're going to write a novel of thoughts, this is how to do it. The story moves forward, even when Maya is looking back, and it doesn't get slowed down by abstraction. That's not to say Sharma doesn't get at deep truths - Maya thinks: "Addiction is so boring. Look at that dumb person doing the same dumb thing over and over" and "You can't be junkies and be friends. To be a junkie means constantly choosing yourself over anyone else." And for a novel that takes place in the mind, "Problems" is very much grounded in the body - Sharma creates a visceral experience of addiction through graphic descriptions of what heroin does to Maya. The book's vulgarity is deeply and powerfully feminist. Most of Sharma's best lines are too profane to print; Maya's narration is crude, unsettling and often shamelessly sexy. Thinking "with her crotch" leads Maya to prostitution, her philosophy of which is that "over time you've done enough stuff that you didn't really feel like doing that eventually it doesn't seem like that big of a deal." And for Maya, paid sex isn't unwanted sex - she gets off on it. She occasionally makes degrading remarks about other women that a "good feminist" shouldn't make, but even this behavior seems like a feminist response to the patriarchal commandment that women must always be polite. Maya is not polite, and although I found her captivating and charming, Sharma's goal is not to make her likable. Maya is as horrible, and as fully human, as men in literature have always been allowed to be. A woman with a heroin addiction narrates her life with quirky humor. LAUREN HOLMES is the author of "Barbara the Slut and Other People."
