“That skirt is so short I can see your soul.”

That’s one of the biting lines in Eve Tushnet’s novel Amends. Kate Havard reviews it. The story is about a reality show focused on alcoholics going through rehab for a month.

At first, it appears that [the right-wing journalist] and his fellow cast members [and Internet social justice warrior and a would-be saint, among others] have nothing in common except for their sustained commitment to drinking and “waiting for the alcohol to eat up the present and excrete it as the past.” But it turns out that what this group has in common is a great talent for lying, mostly to themselves. Each cast member has built an elaborate origin story that allows them to keep on living in a way they know, but can’t admit, is unsustainable. . . .

The addicts in Tushnet’s novel who are really in trouble, though, are the ones who have given up trying to justify themselves, and choose to tell the story in which they are not, and cannot ever be, good.

[via Prufrock]