Problems

Maya is a thirty-year-old graduate student in New York City who has been using heroin since she was eighteen. She lives with her husband Peter, works at a bookstore, and sleeps with a former professor on the side. After a disastrous Thanksgiving at Peter's parents' house, the marriage ends and the affair dries up, and Maya's life narrows into a cycle of getting high, sleeping with strangers for drug money, attempting to get clean, and starting over. Sharma narrates all of it in a meandering, diaristic voice that refuses to look away from the dope-sickness, the affairs, and the daily indignities, building a portrait of an anti-heroine who insists on saying the unsayable.