Turns out this was a research paper before Valdez Quade expanded it into a novel: Poor Life Choices: a Pan-generational and Cross-sectional Case Study, published in Depressing Neuropsychology News du Jour. Or maybe it was Prefrontal Cortex: Is One Really Necessary for Species Survival? in Proceedings of the Our World Is Fucked Society.

Damn, this was brutal. A slow-motion train wreck: all the reader can do is watch helplessly as events unfold. Except these are humans, not necessarily stuck on a fixed track, so you sometimes wonder, will they use reason and insight and agency to change their fate? Read for yourself to find out how they do.

Most impressive: Valdez Quade’s ability to make me feel for her characters. Only one, the matriarch, is worth anything; the rest are irresponsible, self-absorbed, ignorant, yet we see them trying to do their best with what they’ve got. (Not-much-of-a-spoiler alert: it’s a pretty low bar for “best”). Valdez Quade loves every one of them, though. She shows their struggles and their occasional brief moments of awareness. They’re all trapped, they know they’re trapped, but when one is deep in a hole it’s just impossible to see a way out. One needs a hand... but sometimes there just isn’t one.

Most painful: the constant realization that there-but-for-go-I. Without going into details, these are people and attitudes that surrounded me in my formative years. Some of them are still present in the lives of people I love. I escaped, but how close did I come to becoming one of those? Thank you, Fortuna.

I still don’t really understand why I (avidly!) read the whole thing. Best I can say is, the environment is toxic, the characters (mostly) ranging from unlikable to contemptible, but the author cares so much and so deeply that I somehow ended up caring too.