Ep. 54: Mastering the Art of Writing a Crossover Book (with Dr. CJ Pascoe)

Academia can sometimes feel like a world locked away in an ivory tower, but what happens when scholarly research breaks free and speaks to the heart of society? My guest in this interview, Dr. CJ Pascoe, does just that in her crossover books, Dude, You're a Fag and Nice is Not Enough.

CJ is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon whose research focuses on inequality, youth, sexuality, and schools. CJ and I discuss the intricacies of inequality in schools, the process of writing books that resonate with both academic and public audiences, and the challenges of balancing a demanding career with personal life.

Check out Leslie's website at www.YourWordsUnleashed.com

Transcript

Top Tips for Writing a Crossover Book with CJ Pascoe

You're listening to Your Words Unleashed podcast with host Dr. Leslie Wang, helping women scholars master their writing habits and publish a book that matters.

I am thrilled to have my first interview with a scholarly author on Your Words Unleashed podcast, and I want to welcome Dr. CJ Pascoe.

Hi, it's great to be here.

So CJ is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on inequality, youth, sexuality, and schools. Her award-winning book, dude, you're a fag, masculinity and sexuality in high school, carefully details the way that homophobic bullying is tied to destructive gender norms for boys and young men. Her new book, Nice is not Enough. Inequality and the limits of kindness at American High, addresses the tenacity of and solutions to race, class, gender, and sexual inequalities in school. And she's also the co-editor of the journal Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. So, again, thanks so much for being here.

CJ, thanks for so much for having me. This is really a fun opportunity.

So just for a bit of background, CJ and I actually went to grad school together at UC Berkeley. she was a few years ahead of me, and I remember going to her for advice about teaching during my very first semester as a graduate ta and probably crying in her office. And she was already well on her way to publishing her first book when I was writing my dissertation. And I should mention that, dude, you're a fag, which was published by UC Press in 2007, is considered a real crossover hit that people are still reading and teaching in their classes today. If you haven't read it, you should, because it's a really incredible example of ethnographic writing that pulls readers in and teaches some very high-level theory along the way. And so I wanted to have CJ on to talk about writing crossover books and to reflect on the writing process now that she's written two sole-authored books.

My first question for you, CJ, is, can you first tell listeners a bit about your research and what inspired you to embark on your latest?

Oh, thanks so much for asking me that question. So, it's always hard when you're an academic to say what your research is about, especially when you're an ethnographer, because often ethnographers go into a setting and don't know what it is they're planning on researching until it sort of jumps out at them. But I will say what my research focuses on is inequality, in everyday interactions, and how we resist inequality in those everyday interactions. I know a lot of sociologists study these inequality writ large, and we look at laws and nations, and I'm really interested in the everydayness of inequality and in these take-it-for-granted interactions that we don't think a lot about. And I've also always been keenly interested in schools. I think schools are these fascinating places where we bring all these sort of different people together and set them in an institution and expect them to sort of get along and get something done, and along the way, produce future citizens for democracy. And so I think things get very complicated there. But I think schools are also an interesting place to study american values, to study our morals, to study what, our belief systems look like, because they are these real sort of microcosms of a society. So I find myself continually being drawn back into schools to study inequality. This new book, nice is not enough, actually initially came out of questions that were lingering after dude, you're a fag. because when I wrote dude, I really focused on two messages the boys were telling me. One was the way that homophobic harassment was, the way that they encouraged each other to be, quote unquote, real men. But the other was, the way that they engaged in these heterosexual interactions with girls in ways that they told me were about flirting and desire, but they looked a lot like sexual harassment. And so I became sort of deeply concerned with the way that we were telling teens and young people that love and affection equated to heterosexual harassment. That that seemed to be something that wouldn't serve anybody, boys or girls. And so I wanted to write a, new book about teen dating and romance practices. And so, nice is not enough. Initially started with that question. I went into a school to document teen dating and romance practices, and it was shortly after Trump had been elected. And so what became very clear after being in the school only a few months, was that nobody wanted to talk to me about teen dating or romance practices. They wanted to talk about racial inequality, about gender inequality, about discussions over sexual identity, about nationalism. And so the book actually became something much different that I had initially planned. It became a book about different forms of inequality playing out in high school in a way that reflected the way inequality was playing out in the nation writ large.

So, interesting. You wrote the book during the pandemic. Such a big accomplishment. So how long did you spend doing research in the high school?

So, I spent two full years in that high school. I was there up until the summer of 2019, and I was planning on doing a bunch of follow-up interviews from the fall of 2019 into the spring of 2020. And those interviews were cut short, ah, by COVID. When we had to suspend all research activity, and so I just began writing the book. And, for academics, of course, we use those interviews to double-check sometimes what it was we were seeing. And so what I ended up doing was having more informal conversations to sort of double-check that. My ethnographic observations resonated and seemed truthful to the people who are experiencing it. But I was not able to do any formal follow-up interviews, which I think maybe resonates with a lot of people's experiences about what happened in the pandemic.

Yeah, everything got put on pause, so, like, huge congrats. Such a big accomplishment to write that book during the pandemic. Get it done.

Yeah, that wasn't easy. And my heart goes out to anybody who's writing during that time. I know people were struggling with dissertations during that time, struggling with different book projects. And because we only had one room in our house that had a door that closed that wasn't a bedroom, and we had multiple kids doing online schooling, it meant that I wrote the majority of that book from about 05:00 a.m. To 08:00 a.m. During the pandemic. And that was really hard. And I know there are a lot of people out there who did something similar. Yeah.

So how did the process of publishing your second book compare to the first one? Are there certain lessons you learned from writing or publishing this book that you applied to this one?

That is a great question. publishing the first ethnographic book and the second ethnographic book were shockingly different processes for me. so when I wrote, dude, right, that was my dissertation, and I was in graduate school. And when you write a dissertation, you have all these eyes on it, everybody's looking at it and giving you feedback. And so when you send it off to a publisher, you know that you've gotten a lot of feedback on that book. But when you write a second solo-authored book, you're often somewhere along the road to being associate professor or full professor, and you don't have that same built in feedback structure. Hopefully, you've been able to put together maybe a writing group where peers can give you some feedback, but you certainly don't have an advisor who is saying, give me your chapter. Let me tell you what you're doing right. Let me tell you what you're doing wrong. And so you have to, be much more proactive in getting that feedback. And I realized that at the midpoint of writing this book that I was really deeply in my own head and not necessarily getting the feedback I needed or wanted something that was compounded by the isolation of the pandemic. And so I, formed a book group to get that kind of feedback. But I think the other major difference was how long it took, because when you're in graduate school, you're on a timeline, and you have these people sort of making sure you're on a timeline. And even still, I took quite a long time to get out of graduate school, but I got the contract for nice is not enough in 2012, and it was published in 2023.

And I think that's important to say because I think we don't often talk a lot about how long it takes to do a book about the requirements of a career. Right. Sometimes we move, sometimes we take on administrative positions. Sometimes we have a heavy teaching load, and of course, we also have a personal life that we hopefully want to attend to. And between the writing of these two books, I had three kids, and it's really hard to do an ethnography when you have little ones who you want to be involved with and take care of. And so I felt for a while, a lot of embarrassment about not getting that second book out sooner. And I remember going for a walk with a mentor of mine who was much further along in his career, and I have since retired. And he said to me on this walk that when he looks back at his cv, it, tells the story of his life. And by that he meant that when his kids were young, he said most of his pieces were review pieces or they were theory pieces, they were pieces or synthetic pieces, that he wasn't doing a lot of original ethnographic research when his kids were young, because he was attending to them. And that made me feel so much better as I looked around at my own writing projects. One was a multisite ethnography with 20 other people that resulted in a book. Two other pieces were edited volumes that I coedited with other people who also had young children. And so it gave me some permission to have a career that looked different at different times because of what was happening in my personal life and allowed me to sort of honor what was happening in my personal life and not feel bad that I wasn't sort of producing at the same rate or in the same way when I had little ones.

I think that's going to be such a relief for so many listeners to hear. I think so many women on the tenure track also have young kids, and they just feel like they are falling way behind all the time. And since we're on this topic, can you give any good advice about how to write a book when you are balancing your academic work? Teaching takes up a lot of time. Service takes up a lot of time. As grad students, we had no idea about service. And then your personal life, how can you find any kind of balance?

That is such a great question. And it's a daily practice, right? When I think about finding balance, I think about the fact that it is always a daily practice for me and something that I recommit myself to on a regular basis. And so for me, I need a lot of balance because I am, by nature, a workaholic. And I think many of us who enter into academia are for a whole host of reasons. And one of those reasons is a really good reason. I think. We love what we do. We are so fortunate to be able to build a career out of something that we love. However, I think what nobody warned me about was that if you have a career doing something you love, then that career can become your life, and the thing you love can govern you and really take a toll. And for me, it will. I will work myself to exhaustion if I don't have strict boundaries in place to make sure I live a whole and authentic life. And so I actually write those down. I write down what my work hours are, how many hours I will dedicate to each thing I write down. And this may seem silly, and for some people, this may come more naturally, but I write down what my social life and my personal life should consist of. Right. I carve out space for my runs. I'm a trail runner. I carve out space for spinning classes because I love spinning. I make sure that I have social time with friends who are not academics. Once a week at least. Right? Like, that's my bare minimum, because I found that sometimes when my entire social life consists of academics, then we talk about academia a lot, and then it becomes the sort of, we sort of build on each other's workaholism in a way that I'm not sure is good for all of us. And so I have, these benchmarks for myself to keep myself. I think of them almost like, bumpers when you're bowling, to keep that ball in the lane. And I find that that makes me a much happier person. And that sounds easy when I say it, and it actually makes me more productive, too. it sounds easy when I say it.

And I think where things get sticky is with something you mentioned, which is service. Right. because service in many of our careers is a super amorphous thing. It's only supposed to take up, what, maybe 20%, I think, of what it is we do. But when you look at how much time we spend in service, it's usually quite a bit more. And I think, especially for women, we're often told, oh, well, service is important when it comes to promotion and tenure, but we're never told how much service or what kind of service, and when we've done enough service, or sometimes even what counts as service. And I think that gets really dangerous because it becomes this goal that's impossible to attain, and then we never feel like we're doing enough. And so for me, and this actually really happened in the pandemic. I felt like these service loads were building and building and building. And while so many of us were simultaneously breaking under the weight of this service load, as we tried to sort of navigate a new normal for me, I had to sit down and say, okay, what service matters to me, and what service can I focus on? And I developed a philosophy of focusing on student centered service. What I care about in academia is the students. And so I made a sort of plan for myself to focus on service that benefits students, right. And that I was not going to be volunteering to do administration facing service, because that simply isn't my calling. And that burnt me out versus giving me energy. And so I do things like serve on the undergraduate research council that sets up research opportunities for young folks. I offer to serve as a honors thesis advisor as many times as I can, to help students create original research projects. And that way, for me, my service has a philosophy that can help me make decisions when I get asked to do other service projects. And it allows me to say, no, that's not the service I will do, but I will do this other service. So those, are some of the ways that I try to structure a life so that I have room for my own writing projects, right? So, boundaries, having a service philosophy. And the third thing is to write first. I always write before I do anything else. Because if I do anything else, I mean, not anything else, I work out in the morning first. But, like, in terms of work, I always write before I do any other type of work. I carve out that writing time. If it's an hour, if it's 2 hours, the writing time comes first. Because if it doesn't and I open my inbox, my day will get derailed. And that takes an amount of self control that is immense for me. It might not for everybody else, but for me. It takes a lot. And so I try to reward myself. Like, okay, if I write first and I don't open that inbox, then I get to do wordle, and then I'll open my inbox, right? I try to have a little prize built in to keep myself from getting derailed.

I think all of those are so useful. I think what I'm really hearing is, you've done a deep dive into your values and the things that really do inspire and motivate you on an internal level. And you've been very intentional in figuring out in different areas of your life, how can you lean into those values? And I think that it's like, basically, you did a whole bunch of self-coaching.

I did a lot of therapy as well. I think that has a lot to do with it, which is a privilege, right. That I happen to have good health insurance. That allowed me to think about what feeds me versus what sort of burns me out. And so I think opportunities you provide can help people sort of figure out where they have agency and how to set up a career that feeds them instead of takes a toll on them. And I think with academia, we know as sociologists that work itself is a greedy institution, that it'll take and take and take and take and take. And I think there's something about academic institutions that is exceptionally greedy. And so for those of us who are good workers, and we want to do the right thing, and we get that little hit of being, I'm helpful.

Right.

And that feels good, that it can be really hard to set those boundaries. And so I think, as you say, if you can figure out what your values are and find where those push points are so that you can set those up in your career, it can make for a healthier you and a more productive and fulfilling career, I think.

Yeah, making work work for you. I think it's so great.

I wanted to ask you some questions, too, about writing for a more general audience, because everybody tells me that's what they want to do, and their writing very rarely matches what a regular audience can consume and understand and really be engaged by. And so the hard thing, I think, sometimes is writing both excessively and making sure that there's scholarly rigor to it. So I feel like you've really found a way to do that.

So what's your approach? 

Wow. Thank you for saying that, because this, again, is a daily practice that I'm never sure if I've quite attained. So it's nice to hear that feedback from you. So I'm going to tell you something that I don't necessarily say often, but I did not end up in graduate school because I wanted to be a sociologist. I knew my whole life that I wanted to write books. That's all I wanted to do, was to write. But I'm also someone who needs a lot of stability, so I knew I was going to have to have a career with some kind of paycheck that hopefully would allow me to write. And I didn't know what that was going to look like, so I thought about, well, should I become a therapist, or should I become a lawyer, like many of my friends were doing? Or. I'm good at sociology. And it wasn't until professor, when I was an undergrad, pulled me aside and said, you're going to write a senior thesis. It's going to be with me, and then you're going to go to Berkeley. And I was like, okay, great. I guess that's what I'll do. And that's, quite frankly, how I ended up in graduate school at Berkeley, right? This professor told me to do this, and I realized that, being an academic was a way I could write books for a living. And so when I wrote my know, I had never read a dissertation. I didn't know what it was like to write a dissertation. And so I sat down with the books that I loved. I sat down with shades of white by Pamela Perry, a woman without class. I'm, trying to think the other books that I sat down with, old Barry Thorne's book gender play. So I sat down with these books that really spoke to me, and I wrote a dissertation that looked like that. It, was Arlene Hookshield's second, shift as well. And so I tried to write a dissertation that looked like those books. So my dissertation, pretty much unrevised, became published as, dude, your effect, which I now know is a fairly rare thing to have happen. And I didn't do it on purpose. I did it because I didn't know what a dissertation looked like, and I just wanted to write a book. So I did that for my dissertation. And so I think the way then that book spoke to more general audiences as well as academics, is that I write like I teach, I write like I speak, and I write like I teach, which means that my intended audience is almost always my students. And so when you write like you teach, it means that you introduce something, and then you unpack it for a smart group of humans, and then you build on that to introduce the next thing that you can, then unpack for the smart group of humans. And so there's a cadence to the way I write. For those of us who look at writing structure, there's a cadence to the way I write. And it's almost always like that example. Unpack builds to another example that then gets unpacked, and with knowledge from that next example, builds to another one that you then unpack. So all that is to say that my inability to write a dissertation using academic voice was what allowed me to sort of speak to the public. But what happened in the ensuing years was that that voice that I wrote my dissertation in gradually disappeared. The deeper I got into academia, as I continued on the tenure track, the less I had a voice that resonated easily with public audiences. I think because I was reading so many academic articles, I was writing academic articles because that's what I needed to do to get promoted. I became an editor of a journal, so I was reading a lot of academic articles that way. And that voice is so different, right. The voice that we write academic articles in is a voice that treats language as a tool and not as an art. And I think that for good reason, when we write an academic article, we're trying to convey facts and prove or disprove a hypothesis, prove or not prove a hypotheses. And so language just becomes a tool, and it's no longer sort of beautiful, if that makes sense. And so when I wrote nice is not enough, the first couple versions of it had that voice. It was a lot of passive voice. It wasn't written in a way that was lyrical at all. It probably still isn't very lyrical, but it's more lyrical than it was. And it used language like a tool, didn't feel good, and it took a lot of revision to unlearn in my brain that academic way of writing. And so when you say a lot of people want to write for a public audience, but the writing doesn't always match that. I think because of the input we get in academia tends to be input that doesn't value writing as an art and values it as a tool. And so there's a lot of unlearning that has to happen if we want to write for the public. And so one of the things that I would encourage people to do is just read books that are written for the public, right? I read a ton of fiction. I read high level fiction. I read thriller fiction. I read popular, sort of nonfiction books. Then I also read, sort of crossover academic books. and I think filling your head both with academic language, but also with language that is outside of the academy, that's understandable by a wide range of people. That that will help you both unlearn some of this writing as a tool, practice that we're taught, and I think it will allow you to find your own public writing voice, which I think we all have because we're all teachers. So we know how to talk to people who are not other phds. We know how to do it. We talk to students all the time. And so to bring that voice in, I think, requires a lot of unlearning.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's so interesting that you feel like you had more of a, writer's voice, a book writer's voice, earlier on, because what I find with most of my clients is that grad school socializes them into using ridiculous amounts of jargon, passive voice, and hiding behind other people's ideas. So I think part of it is that writing is treated as a tool rather than an art, but also, people are scared to death of being critiqued. So a lot of it is like, I'm afraid of. Reviewer number two is going to come after me, right. Everyone's got that experience of really mean, snarky, even personalized kinds of anonymous reviews of articles, and everyone's like, I cannot go through that. And this is a book, and I'm putting myself on display, and it's scary. What do you think about folks that need to, both unlearn it, but also become more confident that they're not always going to be attacked or they don't have to be writing in a defensive way. Right. 

I love that you've said that, that we're trained to write in this incredibly defensive, combative way, rather than standing on the shoulders of giants and building a conversation. Right. That we are trained to look for a gap, look for where other people have done it wrong, go in, say why everybody else is wrong, you're right, and then be sort of proactively defensive against the reviewers that are going to read this thing and then critique you. And I think that's a heartbreaking way to build knowledge rather than thinking about it as this mutual practice where other people have said smart things and we're going to build on their smart things by saying more smart things. Right. It's, like, such a different way of thinking than the way we're trained to think. And, the double-blind review process can be absolutely brutal. I was on the receiving end of multiple brutal reviews. I never published a single, piece in a sociology journal until I started co-authoring with other people. Nothing I've ever individually authored has been published in a sociology journal, and I think there's a reason for that. I think I'm bad at writing the way that journals require us to write in this really sort of combative way. And so I would encourage people to maybe develop two ways of writing a book voice and an article voice. Right. Because I'm not sure that we can single-handedly change the article system, and I'm not sure that people should do that at the cost of their careers. And so the article voice, of course, is this more sort of combative voice or passive voice or using writing as a tool. But there is a lot more space in writing books to have a more creative and less defensive voice. And I think if you look around at other authors who have been fairly successful, you can actually see that. I think Anthony Ocampo's work is a great example of this. Tressie Cotton's work is a great example of this. Of course, there is work that translates incredibly complex academic ideas in a way that both sustains the complexity of those ideas and translates those ideas to a public audience. And I think the less time we can spend on being defensive, of course, the more time than we can spend on translating those ideas in this really sort of beautiful way. However, people will critique you for that, and I can't say they won't. The number of, I'll say, borderline snide comments I've received about how clear my writing is. Wow, your writing is really accessible or clear. And I've seen it in printed reviews. It's been a lot. And I then just say, well, thank you. I will take that as a compliment, even though I'm pretty sure that's not the way you meant it. And so part of it is being able to stand with what you know you have to say and how you're going to say it. And knowing that that critique is about being wedded to a particular version of academia that maybe you're not as wedded to. I know. That's what I had to develop. Uh-huh. Yeah.

I mean, I tell my clients all the time, you're going to be critiqued no matter what.

Well, that's a good point. So it's like, write for the people you want to write for and say it in the way you want to say it.

And one of the things that I think is really brilliant about your work is that you make yourself a character in your stories. And I know a lot of people find that challenging because they don't want to or they want to seem like there's some objective distance, with the story they're trying to tell and themselves. And so how do you kind of decide when to work yourself in and how to sort of portray yourself as the interpreter of what's going on?

Wow, I so appreciate you saying that, because some of the comments that I get when my books are reviewed, when it's in process, are, put more of yourself in there. There's not enough of you in there. And I always think like, oh, my gosh, there's so much of me in there. I can't be in there any more than I actually am. So I usually actually resist those responses. So it's nice to hear response that you think I'm in there a lot. when you're a lady person writing about guys, which is what I was with, dude, I knew there was no way anybody was going to think I was objective. I obviously have all my critiques about the fact that none of us are objective, but in addition to that, I knew that because of my positionality and who I was studying, nobody was going to think I was objective. So I might as well just put myself in there. And the boys drew me in, right? They started sexually harassing me the same way they were sexually harassing the girls at their school. So there was no way I could not be in there, because I myself became part of the data, as field workers often do. And so I think that them drawing me in just sort of broke that wall down, so that in all future writing, I was like, well, I'm part of this, I guess. And I think that became even more true and nice is not enough, because when I walked into that school, one of the things I saw in the teacher library was, dude. Right? So I was already a part of that school before I physically came into the school. Wow. Yeah. That was, this real sort of meta moment. And I think to take myself out of that situation would actually do a disservice to the data itself, because the students and the teachers treated me as part of that community. And so there would be a hole, if I took myself out, there'd be, like, a hole in that data. I was pretending I wasn't there and not existing when I was there, very much changing what was actually happening there. Right. My presence changes things. And so I think to pretend that I wasn't there would be a disservice to the data. But I think there's another reason why I put myself in which might be a selfish reason or it might be based on an assumption I have that's not true, and I'm not sure. But when I read a book, if I can't connect with someone who is in that book, a character who is in there, I have a very hard time with. And I remember this when I read the corrections by Jonathan Franzen when I was in graduate school or my postdoc. I remember being so angry at that book because I could not connect with a single character in it, and I was just incredibly upset. And so I know that one of the reasons I am in my ethnographies as a character is because I wonder if that provides some people a way in to connect with what is happening there. Especially when we think of teenagers as this strange, scary group of humans who we don't understand, we're so glad we're done with ourselves that to maybe have someone who's closer in age or life phase in that book, who isn't a teacher, isn't a principal, might provide a way in for some readers. and so that's another reason why I appear there and I keep my emotions sort of present in the books as well, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the narrator is a proxy for the audience. You're the eyes, ears, nose, everything, right? And so the more you can kind of evoke the senses and allow really paint a picture with words, I think that's what an audience needs to be able to connect with any of it.

Right.

So they have to connect with you first and then with everything else. So I have really enjoyed this conversation, CJ, and I know listeners have learned so much. What's the best way for them to connect with you?

Oh, gosh. Well, you can find me on almost all the socials, on Facebook, on threads, on blue sky. and of course, email. M is a great way to connect with me through my personal email, which is the cjpasco@cjpasco.org. is probably the best way to reach me.

Perfect. Yes. So if anyone out there is listening, you want to invite CJ for a book talk you want to know more about? Nice is not enough. Please go out and buy the book. It's available on the UC press website. It's also available on Amazon. I will link to it on the episode page. So thank you again, CJ, for being here.

Thanks for having me. And I will say that if anybody ever wants to talk about book writing or the struggles of book writing or just needs a little bit of commiseration about how long it takes to write books. feel free to reach out, and I'm always happy to respond with some words of support or some fellow commiseration or celebration.

Yes, so generous as well. So listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this and I will talk to you again soon. 

Thanks for tuning into Your Words Unleashed podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with other writers or leave a rating and review. To find the full transcript and catch all the latest from me, check out my website, your wordsunleash.com. I'll talk to you next time. Happy writing.

Episode References

Dr. CJ Pasco

Email:

Website:

All the places:

University of Oregon

https://www.uoregon.edu/

Dude, You're a Fag

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520271487/dude-youre-a-fag

Nice is Not Enough

?

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

https://journals.sagepub.com/home/srd

UC Press

https://www.ucpress.edu/

UC Berkeley

https://www.berkeley.edu/

Pamela Perry's 'Shades of White'

https://www.dukeupress.edu/shades-of-white

Barry Thorne's 'Gender Play'

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/gender-play/9780813519234

Arlie Hochschild's 'The Second Shift'

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/329833/the-second-shift-by-arlie-hochschild-with-anne-machung/

Anthony Ocampo

https://anthonyocampo.com/

Tressie McMillan Cottom

https://tressiemc.com/

Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections'

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312421274/thecorrections