TROUBLE GIRL, book 2 in the Do the Wrong Thing series, 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, however, she can’t stop, placing one memory after the other in a parade of isolated incidents that at first, don’t seem to connect.
If you like Knausgaard, Ferrante, and Rachel Cusk, you’ll love this Gen X Proust.
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About
Malcolm van Delst stands out as a lazy writer in a profession notorious for idlers and bums. She crowd-sourced this bio. She is a former lady who codes, a sometime bitcoin miner fond of get-rich-quick schemes and has a knack for dramatifying.
Originally from Ottawa, Canada, she now lives in Vancouver. She would never use the upside down facelift technique in a photo.