Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.

At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube.

She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.

I’m a total atheist, and for me it’s just about trying to find something that rises above the banal day-to-day bullshit of living.

Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither it is a brave, original book.