Juliet the Maniac: A Novel

"For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Juliet the Maniac is a worthy new entry in that pantheon of deconstruction ... Dazzling."—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWA cult-favorite stylist holds nothing back in this darkly funny, unromantic look at the underbelly of coming-of-age and its brutal trials… Juliet is a typical teenage girl—a little beast. Lingering just underneath Southern California’s sunny, sandy beach culture, one young woman struggles to survive herself as she hurtles through the mid 90’s and tries to make sense of her on-and-off relationship with recovery. Juliet knows she should be poised for success. She knows her honors English teacher shouldn’t be changing her grades from F's to C's out of pity, knows she shouldn’t be snorting coke and chain-smoking at the Palms, knows she shouldn’t be hallucinating shadowy, Joan-of-Arc-like messages from God. But there is something dark and violent inside of her fourteen-year-old heart that makes it impossible for Juliet to stop self-destructing. The two forced hospitalizations didn’t help her, neither did the outpatient facility for gay, depressed art kids—maybe Redwood Trails therapeutic boarding school will? Through her Didion-esque lens, Escoria captures the brutality of girlhood—its fleeting, toxic friendships, the monstrous ways anger transforms, and the constant feeling of being close to normal, but not normal at all.

A heart-breaking, coming-of-age story that follows a mid-1990s teenager as she falls into a downward spiral of multiple mental illnesses, including bipolar personality disorder and depression and describes her struggle to climb back from it. Original.