Nothing Will Be Different

In this memoir-in-essays, a neurotic party girl scrambles to rationalize life as she knows it after finding a lump in her breast. Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet, Tara can’t stay sober. She’s terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired. Then, in the autumn following her twenty-seventh birthday, an abnormal lump discovered in her left breast serves as the catalyst for a journey of rigorous self-questioning. Waiting on a diagnosis, she begins an intellectual assessment of her life — desperate to justify a short existence full of dumb choices. Armed with her philosophy degree and an angry determination, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by, and winds up writing a searingly honest coming-of-age memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.