Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

A sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no insight into how to live in it, James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all the assumptions that govern the adult world around him—including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his grandmother, stymies his therapist, deplores his sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he had expected.