The Answers

Starred review from December 12, 2016
In Lacey’s (Nobody Is Ever Missing) remarkable novel, Mary has “spent a year suffering undiagnosable illnesses” when she finds a strange treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, which immediately helps. The problem is Mary’s broke, so she answers a high-paying Craigslist ad and soon ends up participating in überfamous actor Kurt Sky’s so-called Girlfriend Experiment. The goal of the experiment is to find out whether a perfect relationship can be achieved if each of many girlfriends serves a single role for Kurt. As the Emotional Girlfriend, Mary is to listen “to Kurt talk while remaining fully engaged by asking questions,” to send texts to him, and to eventually cry in front of him. She is told “sexual intimacy will not be expected of the Emotional Girlfriend” since Kurt has the Intimacy Team for that purpose. While Kurt becomes more and more intrigued by the “totally unpretentious” Mary in his attempt to find out “How to best love?”, the truth of the experiment comes to light. The novel examines the unreliability of our own bodies and emotions (at one point, the experiment’s sensors mistakenly register Mary’s feeling of obligation as a feeling of love), as well as our detachment from others—that dark gap between what someone does and what someone actually means to do. Mary is trying to trust her body through Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, while Kurt’s Anger Girlfriend, Ashley, one of the best characters in the novel, only trusts her anger: her hate is “gleeful and all-consuming and an unlikely companion through her days.” Lacey displays an exceptional ability to articulate the elusiveness of knowing others, as well as the desire to find meaning and trust within. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from April 1, 2017
Startling and stunning and compulsively strange, Lacey's (The Art of the Affair, 2017, etc.) sophomore novel is a haunting investigation into the nature of love."I'd run out of options," reflects Mary Parsons, a young woman with a haunted past. "That's how these things usually happen." After a year and a half overcome with sickening, inexplicable pain--headaches, back aches, strange lumps, broken ribs--Mary is desperate for relief in any form she can find it. And she does find it, in something called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia--PAKing, for short. But while searching for a second job to pay for the treatment ("neuro-physio-chi bodywork" is pricey), Mary stumbles upon a mysterious ad for a high-paying, low-time-commitment "income-generating experience." After several increasingly bizarre interviews, she finds herself embroiled in narcissistic actor Kurt Sky's "Girlfriend Experiment"--a supposedly scientific inquiry designed to uncover and perfect the mechanisms of romantic love. Mary will be playing the role (though it is not, the researchers are clear, an acting job) of "Emotional Girlfriend," one of a cadre of themed Girlfriends--Anger Girlfriend, Maternal Girlfriend, Intellectual Girlfriend--each assigned to handle a single facet of partnership. Her job: listen, ask questions, touch the actor's hand at appropriate intervals. After five weeks, exchange keys; after two to four months, say "I love you" after "an emotionally intimate moment." Observant and almost pathologically self-contained, Mary is an unusually good fit for the gig. But when Kurt's attachment intensifies, Mary becomes increasingly entangled in his unsettling quest as the boundaries between them grow increasingly less stable. Far from distilling love, the experiment only complicates it, as the possibility of perfect connection seems to slip ever further out of reach. With otherworldly precision and subtle wit, Lacey creates a gently surreal dreamscape that's both intoxicating and profound. A singular novel; as unexpected as it is rich.

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March 15, 2017

Mary Parsons is a lonely young woman trying to find her way in a cold world after a terrible childhood. This is certainly a well-worn theme in fiction, but Lacey (Nobody Is Ever Missing) gives her story a fresh, Millennial spin in this quirky look at contemporary society. Struggling to make it in New York City, Mary is further hampered by crippling health problems that seem incurable. She finds relief in a treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, or PAKing, but these cures are prohibitively expensive. To pay for her much-needed therapy, she discovers a job on Craigslist for a "Girlfriend Experiment." This is a grandiose project by the self-absorbed actor Kurt Sky, who hopes to land the perfect romance by paying several women to fulfill different roles in his life. Mary is hired to be the "Emotional Girlfriend" and soon gets more than she bargained. Will this strange turn provide her with the answers she's looking for or only pose more questions? VERDICT Recommended for those who appreciate thought-provoking and imaginative literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 12/19/16.]--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2017
In Lacey's ambitious second novel, after Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), sometimes-narrator Mary signs on to two odd regimens, neither of which she knows much about, at around the same time. The first is an unclassifiable therapy, recommended by her friend, called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, or PAKing. Immediately, the chronic pain that's been fraying her betraying body for ages begins to abate. Mary's other curiosity is the second job she, already deeply in debt, picks up to pay for the incredibly expensive PAKing sessions: she's hired, and paid highly, to be the Emotional Girlfriend of famous actor Kurt Sky as part of the elaborate, fantastical Girlfriend Experiment to perfect and simplify romantic relationships and extend the feeling of limerence, or falling in love. Through her characters' thoughts, most notably those of Mary and the other Girlfriendswomen who are constantly directed, surveyed, and evaluatedLacey proves herself to be a writer of finely tuned perceptions who creates sprawling psyches. For fans of surreal, thought-provoking, and intriguingly untidy literary fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)