NOVEL, a staged reading

A staged reading of excerpts from NOVEL, Caroline Rothstein’s new novel in progress.

NOVEL is a split-timeline literary fiction novel—think Sliding Doors (1998) meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, with the punch and snark of Elif Bautman’s The Idiot.

It’s lockdown. Ariella Lynne Levkoff (Ari!) is convinced she’ll be fine in her Upper West Side apartment. She’s a resilient mid-30s millennial orphan! With two Ivy League degrees! But then, she becomes a danger to herself, nearly relapsing into the self-harming behaviors from which she was certain she recovered. She rents a car, drives back to the Midwest—where she grew up—and shacks up with her siblings in their Michigan cottage. Ari wavers in and out of hyper-intellectual anxiety-spirals, desperate not to relapse, while finally starting to grieve—and maybe even heal.

On another timeline, Ari lives in the West Village; and her parents aren’t dead. When the pandemic hits, her overly protective (Loving! Sometimes emotionally suffocating!) parents insist she come back to her Midwest childhood home to quarantine with her parents and siblings. Once back, Ari’s years of being fully recovered from a decade-long eating disorder begin to slip. She loves her family, but why do they always bring her brain—and body—to the edge?

NOVEL, the novel, dances back and forth between these two timelines: in one, Ari wrestles with her recovery from self-harm; in the second, an eating disorder. In each narrative, the respective griefs and losses clouding Ari’s life, the particular family dynamics she feeds (and avoids) amongst her siblings and parents (dead or alive), as well as the respective paths her life and career took as a result of each timeline’s traumas and events, she faces the novelty of healing. What does it actually look like to recover—fully, or maybe never—in a fully unraveling world?

Please note: NOVEL contains themes of mental illness, including eating disorder recovery, self-harm thoughts, anxiety, depression, as well as themes of grief and loss. If you or a loved one are experiencing a mental health crisis, 988 offers 24/7 judgment-free support for mental health, substance use, and more. Text, call, or chat 988.