23-year-old Edie begins her affair with Eric with high hopes. He’s twice her age, has a respectable job and nice car, looks good and has an excellent command of grammar.

He’s also white with a wife and kid in the suburbs, but they’ve settled on an open marriage–something Edie finds sophisticated, and convenient. When she loses her job and apartment, fate lands her in his house, recast as a mentor for his adopted Black daughter. Edie’s orphaned without role models, an artist who can’t get her own self-portrait quite right. What can she offer anyone?

Edie’s narration is funny, if not angry, desperate, and itchy. She’s burning with loneliness. She’s one of two Black people in her office before she’s fired. She’s the third wheel in a marriage. She’s an orphan navigating the gig economy, waiting on a callback from an interview at a clown college. Her observations of microaggressions and her own failures as she navigates this world are gripping.

It’s not a long book, but I thought about it for days after.