Piece of Mind - Softcover

Arresting....smart, honest and funny.

As much about the bond between siblings as about traumatic brain injury.

A delightful page-turner packed full of warmth, humor, and bubbling, sparkling joy.

A moving story of grief, resilience, and self-actualization...Adelman fully inhabits Lucy's voice, and the resulting tale is as realistic as it is uplifting.

Lucy's narrative is sensitive, witty, and illuminating...excellently draw. Her journey and the evolution of her relationships offer a rare glance at the unknowable.

With simplicity and humor, her story testifies to the fierce, universal human need for self-expression.

Adelman beautifully conveys Lucy's idiosyncratic voice and outlook on the world, including her blunt observations on the people she meets...She resists pat, too-easy endings, and instead focuses on realistically depicting Lucy's strengths and weaknesses, humor, failings and tentative steps toward believing in her own capabilities.

Piece of Mind is such a beautiful debut, one that will indelibly imprint the reader with Lucy's unique voice and vision. She channels the raw states of grief and joy and bewilderment with such a pure-hearted intensity. Her New York is a flickery frontier, exciting and scary, where she toggles between states of numbness and excruciating sensitivity. Michelle Adelman is so articulate about what we know and cannot say, what we can barely stand to know, and what we bravely face each day as individuals in families, together and alone.--Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Piece of Mind is compulsively readable, built around a set of relatable, engaging characters and a compelling central problem for its protagonist.--Liz Moore, author of Heft

Piece of Mind is animated by sense and innocence. Michelle Adelman has written a truly charming novel full of humor and warmth. Sex and drugs and polar bears abound.--Cathleen Schine, author of Fin and Lady and The Three Weissmanns of Westport

At twenty-seven, Lucy knows everything about coffee, comic books, and Gus (the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo), and she possesses a rare gift for drawing. But since she suffered a traumatic brain injury at the age of three, she has had trouble relating to most people. She’s also uncommonly messy, woefully disorganized, and incapable of holding down a regular job. When unexpected circumstances force her out of the comfortable and protective Jewish home where she was raised and into a cramped studio apartment in New York City with her college-age younger brother, she must adapt to an entirely different life—one with no safety net. Over the course of a challenging summer, Lucy is forced to discover that she has more strengths than she herself knew.