The Answers: A Novel

Mary Parsons is struggling. Nearing thirty, with a serious but undiagnosed illness, mounting debt, a dead-end job, and bad romantic luck, she’s still waiting for the happiness she foresaw when she escaped her religious-fanatic father and changed her life. Desperate for help, she follows a friend’s suggestion to begin a series of therapy sessions called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, which–though odd–seem to bring relief to her ailments. To help pay for the therapy, she accepts an equally odd new job as an Emotional Girlfriend for Kurt Sky, a famous actor, who has embarked on an ambitious project to compartmentalize, analyze, and quantify every aspect of romantic love. But splitting up a romantic human relationship is more messy than scientific, and everyone involved–from Mary to Kurt to Ashley, the “Anger Girlfriend”–becomes more, not less, confused.

What is love? And how might we prevent ourselves from falling out of it, once in? Such are the questions in which Mary becomes mired with Kurt. But ultimately she must confront even more elemental questions about identity, having come to understand that the real answers of her life lie not with others but within herself.