Careers in Geography

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Careers in Geography maps out a year in the accidental life of an acerbic young wage-slave navigating unwanted promotions, nonsensical parental advice, her skittish love life and her repulsively-hip corner of Los Angeles, ultimately discovering that the hardest job is knowing where you belong.

A promotion doesn’t change the fact that Fern still dusts bobbleheads and fake dog poop, has a disappearing almost-boyfriend, an answering-machine relationship with her ill father who no longer has all the answers and the sinking feeling that post-Coming of Age panic might keep her hawking tchotchkes forever. Over four seasons of false starts, she carves a crooked path toward a leap into the unemployed unknown.

Beset with footnotes and literary graffiti, it’s a novel about what happens before a novel can be written, about where to look for life when no map covers everything. The real denouement of Careers in Geography is the book itself, a record of the year it took to get it out.