DEATH VALLEY

A writer whose father is dying escapes to the desert to face (or avoid) her grief and ends up with much more than she bargained for.

A woman wanders in the California desert. She hikes through scrub, shadowy dunes, the “orchestral quiet” of the rocks, plants, and animal life. Back in Los Angeles, her father is in the intensive care unit, walking the knife’s edge between life and death after a car accident. She’s also left behind a disabled husband whose illness has complicated their marriage. As the woman walks, she contemplates the natural world, the ties that bind us to the ones we love, the nature of God. She watches lizards and rabbits; she talks to rocks. She comes to a fork in the trail: One route leads back to her life in LA; the other leads deep into the ruthless desert. Which will she take? If this all sounds a bit woo woo, a taste of Burning Man with a touch of Siddhartha, fear not: This is Broder, the poet, essayist, novelist, and author of some of Twitter’s most viral bons mots as @sosadtoday. Her style mixes therapy-adjacent hyper-self-awareness, dark humor, and a jovially narcissistic approach to tragedy (“I am still the kind of the person who makes another person’s coma all about me”). It is also, among all its other guises, a book about writing: The narrator is struggling with her novel-in-progress (about a woman with an ill husband and a dying father, natch) whose structure she cannot figure out. This is not a subtle book—the protagonist is very literally walking in the valley of the shadow of death—but it’s as wise in its way as any spiritualism about vision quests or finding enlightenment.

A 100 percent Broder take on grief and empathy: embodied but cerebral, hilarious but heart-wrenching.