The Painful Truth About The Pressures Of Academic Life

The woman who narrates Weike Wang’s debut novel has stumbled into a quarter-life crisis. A Chinese-American chemistry Ph.D. student, she has always expected (as have her parents) that she would progress from triumph to academic triumph. A top student in high school, she was admitted to a prestigious university and excelled at chemistry.

Now, the time has arrived for her to complete her dissertation research and claim her graduate degree. But that isn’t happening.