Problems

by Jade Sharma

Dark, raw, and very funny, Problems introduces us to Maya, a young woman with a smart mouth, time to kill, and a heroin hobby that isn't much fun anymore. Maya's been able to get by in New York on her wits and a dead-end bookstore job for years, but when her husband leaves her and her favorite professor ends their affair, her barely-calibrated life descends into chaos, and she has to make some choices.

Maya's struggle to be alone, to be a woman, and to be thoughtful and imperfect and alive in a world that doesn't really care what happens to her is rendered with dead-eyed clarity and unnerving charm. This book takes every tired trope about addiction and recovery, "likeable" characters, and redemption narratives, and blows them to pieces.

Emily Books is a publishing project and ebook subscription service whose focus is on transgressive writers of the past, present and future, with an emphasis on the writing of women, trans and queer people, writing that blurs genre distinctions and is funny, challenging, and provocative.

Jade Sharma is a writer living in New York. She has an MFA from the New School.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction, Addiction, Mental Health, Adult Fiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published July 5, 2016

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

PART ONE

Only today 30 June 2020 I discovered that Jade Sharma died nearly a year ago, on 24 July 2019 and this was a shock, first because she died at age 39, second because it took me a year to find out – why was that? It seems it wasn’t very widely noticed, this death, and I still can’t find any kind of obituary, there’s no cause of death mentioned anywhere, there’s very few mentions anywhere, and this is very bad, she was a fierce funny devastating writer of one single splendid must-read novel. I was waiting for the second one. Well I can stop waiting now.

****

PART TWO - ORIGINAL REVIEW

This is disgusting, funny and totally compelling, and also, frankly, it’s fairly disgusting too. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4. I loved it and I had to finish it all in one day, which in this case was aided greatly by insomnia, which is not so enjoyable. You really need a writer like Jade Sharma if you have a case of bad insomnia, so thank you Jade, your timing was perfect. You get fixed in the cold laser beam of her endless waste-of-space sour, surly junkie self-loathing and the tone never wavers from page first to page last; although it is a bit disappointing that towards the end she seems to cheer up a bit and get her life back on track. Oh, sorry, spoiler!

Well, not really a spoiler, because this is another of the seemingly unending stream of NOVELS WHICH ARE REALLY MEMOIRS and we already know that at some point Jade Sharma was compos mentis enough to write this very book.

Also, Problems fits into some other categories – heroin chic literature (like Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson or Trainspotting & many others); novels of female self-loathing (see below); and great new American voices (so many of those).

I’ll give you a flavour of Jade Sharma, taken at random :

The children looked like trophies. The women were mocking me. Haha, we got a man to have a baby with us!

Find a dude, fall in love, and then slowly start to see whatever special, unique fucked-up hell starts to show itself.

The middle-aged man who interviewed me leered. He asked me personal questions (“Do you live alone. Or?”), made stunted small talk (“I used to live in the city”) and periodically checked to see if my breasts were still where they were the last time. He was one of those old, gross men who went through life trying to muster the courage to commit to sexually harassing someone instead of just being a slimy perv. I took the place of a woman who had kept a calendar with cats that had very unoriginal things to say about Mondays.

So this whole novel is just 90% of whining and moaning about earning money to buy more bags to smoke to get the strength up to go and earn more money to buy more bags and 10% of hey look, I didn’t OD and I bet you thought I was gonna.

This novel should have ended up on the Booker long list at the very least (now they are including American writers) but of course instead there was the latest predictable excretion by Julian Barnes and his ilk.

PART THREE – YOU CAN SKIP THIS, I JUST LIKE TO MAKE LISTS

The novel this most resembles is the brilliant Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce. Read that one too! But there’s a wider context too. After many pages of junkie moaning and groaning, our heroine (geddit?) gets fired and begins to turn tricks via Craigslist. Then comes the pages of true masochism and self-loathing.

Two lists:

NOVELS OF FEMALE SELF-LOATHING BY FEMALE WRITERS

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino – the unnamed un-beautiful older sister spends her whole life hates everybody especially herself

A Day Off by Storm Jameson – the unnamed middle-aged alcoholic frump spends a day hating everybody especially herself

Dietland by Sarai Walker – the heroine spends her entire life loathing her own plus size body

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh – She spends her life looking after her alcoholic father and loathing herself

NOVELS OF FEMALE SELF-LOATHING WHICH ARE REALLY MEMOIRS BY FEMALE WRITERS

All of Jean Rhys’ novels except Wide Sargasso Sea - the variously named alcoholic heroines, all of whom are Jean, spend their allotted few months in each book totally hating themselves and pretty much everything else (the curtains, the breakfast egg, etc)

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill – the unnamed wife spends a solid year or so hating mostly herself

Love me Back by Merritt Tierce – waitressing, drinking, drugging, having a lot of dodgy sex and a lot of yes, self-loathing

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek – the gold standard of female self-loathing against which all other self-loathers are to be judged – Erica Kohut spends her entire waking moments hating herself and everything else to such a level of frenzy that the women in the above-mentioned books would only look on in envy, and loathe themselves a little bit more because they couldn’t quite get to the level of loathingness Erica Kohut achieves with seeming ease.

Problems by Jade Sharma – the latest piquant addition to this list

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Addicted to heroin, unsatisfying relationships with men, and her own torturous life in New York City, our protagonist Maya has more than a couple of problems. Though quite intelligent and observant about the little details in life, she struggles to break free from a cycle of self-destruction that leaves her always wanting more. Avoid this book if you have a frail heart, because Maya engages in loads of explicit sex and drug use, riding the waves of an unstable life until she wears herself out. But she redeems herself with her sharp wit, her consistent cynicism, and her will to keep on going, all the way to the very end.

Problems defies categorization; it creates its own literary mold. The book has no chapters and almost no section breaks, so the prose fashions itself as a wild ride in Maya's uncouth stream-of-consciousness. The writing flows well, though it embraces every raw and uncomfortable thought possible, a squeamish experience, in particular for those who dislike the lack of boundaries in books like So Sad Today . I do not perceive Problems as an enjoyable read, though I do consider it a worthwhile one, similar to the process of overcoming an addiction itself.

Recommended to those who feel drawn to unsympathetic characters, writing that pushes you to the edge of your comfort zone, and unconventional novels. Maya may not win a place in many people's hearts, but she sure does stand out with her jagged, unique voice, one that resonates in its own discomfort. Curious to see what Sharma will write next.

[Oriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm getting in trouble (again, forever) elsewhere for disparaging pompous white men and the pompous white books they pompously write, so I guess I'd better say some things about this one, which is written by a non-pompous non-white non-man.

Guess what, haters? I didn't really like this that much either, which I know may startle you but which should also reveal that I am not doing any of this out of knee-jerk pettiness #becausepatriarchy — I am just looking for good fucking books to read and there are a lot of books that are not so good (in my own personal opinion) and this is the site that is 100% designed for me to talk about that, so.

So let's talk about Jade, but let's first talk about Emily Gould. I am pretty well known for rah-rah-ing Emily in the best but slightly complicated way I can. And this book is pretty much grown from Emily's rib, by which I mean it is the first physical edition put out by Emily Books, the previously ebook-only subscription book club she founded.

I understand why Emily Books published this. It's very of-the-moment: it's, as previously mentioned, a non-white non-man talking very frankly about being addicted to heroin and cheating on her husband and shaving her pubes and masturbating and being unperfect in pretty much all the ways. It's very much a slice-of-life book: We open on Maya waking up in the afternoon, drug-addled and dirty and late for work; over the book she goes through several stints at rehab, spends Thanksgiving with her husband's family, fucks it up with her husband, fucks it up with her lover, fucks a lot of men, does a lot of drugs, has a lot of observations, lives a lot of life, and then it ends. It's like stepping into the stream of someone's life, walking down it for a few months, and then stepping out.

Which is fine. The book is, as I said, very frank, and very conversational, and very observational, and some of the observations are lovely. I particularly liked this one:

Sometimes I felt this horrible ache, like I already knew whatever was happening would become a memory I would think of and cry about after Peter left me. A premature nostalgia, like when you took a picture and imagined what it was going to be like one day to look at it and remember how happy you had been. A part of me was always mourning how painful it would feel after the happiness wore off. So I was never really happy, like ever.

But beyond the observational, the book is uncomplicated, undeveloped, not particularly robust. It's more like a diary than a novel, which, again, that is fine! But it's not amazing, not for me anyway. It feels pupal, unfinished, like half-risen dough (is that too many metaphors in one sentence? maybe).

Whatever. I didn't hate it. I'm glad it exists, I'm gratified to an astonishing degree that we are in this moment where we're advancing and celebrating diverse voices, and I intend to support and keep reading them. This book didn't really do it for me, but hopefully it will find its audience, and that would be fantastic.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partway through reading Problems I started sketching out a review that talked about how it was part of the first wave of Fucked-Up Millennial Woman novels – a trend which has since seen a swift, arguably more sophisticated renaissance, with ever-more irreverent and abstract permutations, so that a straightforward 'I'm a mess' story now seems lacking in nuance – and how I probably would've liked it more a few years ago. But then the story began to turn into something else, and I changed my mind.

It starts like this: on the surface, Maya's life looks fine – good, even. She's married to sweet Peter, but she's hiding two big things from him: the first is an obsessive affair with a much older man, her former professor; the second is the fact that she is totally dependent on heroin. When she attempts to go cold turkey while at Peter's family's house for Thanksgiving, things really begin to fall apart.

This sequence, which is both amusing and horrifying, is just the start of Maya's degeneration. The worse things get, the rawer the narrative becomes, the more (it seems) authentic and true, and while I know it's now considered infra dig to assume any young female writer is writing about herself, it's impossible to read/know anything about Sharma and not think you are reading an autobiographical story. It stops being a fun series of pithy lines about what it is to be a self-confessed fuck-up and starts being a really honest account of addiction and recovery. Obviously, reading this now – after the author's death in 2019 – gives it an extra layer of poignancy.

Problems is sharp, it's funny, it's quotable. But don't mistake it for some quirky life-affirming tale of mild failure and self-discovery. It's a real story about real 'problems', with a conclusion that's both hopeful and unbearably sad.

And I think about those women on Facebook who are always posting pictures of themselves with husbands or children, and I think how for so long, that's what I had wanted. But anyone can find others to hide behind. Being alone, figuring out how to make the hours go, satiating your own wrestling human heart, means you never have to hide or be numb again.

TinyLetter | Linktree

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jesus fucking Christ this book hurt almost as much as it made me cackle. Sometimes it did both at the same time.

[Paltia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring misguided effort to jump on the bandwagon of writing about addiction, sexual contacts and fantasies, and various afflictions. It is juvenile and self absorbed to the point of a big yawn. I imagine the author thinking she’d put all the right ingredients in to titillate readers unfamiliar with a sleazoid lifestyle and have herself a movie deal in no time. This book was called the female Trainspotting. Nowhere even remotely close to Welsh’s talents. I’m not even sure what to do with it. I wouldn’t give it away. It’s that ridiculous.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Beauty or meaning is not intrinsic to suffering. But if you can take the suffering and find the parts that are funny or profound, you can create your world into something that might be entertaining for someone else for a while. Eventually, maybe, that time will have been useful. More useful than, like, working in a bank.”

This book was originally published in the US by Emily Books, a publisher “which celebrates the best work of transgressive writers of the past, present and future”. From 2011 to 2016 operated as a subscription service selecting “underappreciated novels and memoirs, mostly by women” and from 2016 has started publishing two original books a year. “Problems” was their debut publication.

In the UK this book is published by Tramp Press, a small Irish publisher which aims “to find, nuture and publish exceptional literary talent and … is committed to finding only the best and most deserving books, by new and established writers”. Its greatest success has been Mike McCormack’s 2016 Goldsmith Prize winning Solar Bones (which was also Booker longlisted on its subsequent publication by a UK publisher), and more recently Sara Baume’s “A Line Made for Walking” which was shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmith Prize (but which was also, unsuccessfully, entered for the Booker Prize by a UK publisher). As well as their publication success Tramp press are known for two other things: their successful campaign to make Irish presses eligible for the Booker Prize (https://www.tramppress.com/irish-publ... https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...) – so as to avoid the situation they had with both the above mentioned books where they had to sell UK publishing rights to a UK based publisher; their refusal to accept any manuscripts submitted with “Dear Sirs” or which list only male authors as influences (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...). “Problems” is their first publication post the Booker rule change.

An informed reader therefore comes to “Problems” with an expectation that it will not be an ordinary book but a provocative one which challenges literary consensus – and this book does not disappoint.

The book is written in the first person by Maya – a heroin addict who also suffers from mental illness, sexual addiction and an eating disorder.

She is married to the decent and attractive Peter – himself an alcoholic, their different addictions fuelling the sharp rows which characterise their marriage and feature heavily in the book. Maya is simultaneously: hugely sensitive to any criticism by Peter of her own addiction; furious with him that he does intervene more drastically to prevent it; bitter at a world (and particularly Peter’s strict and, in her view, repressed parents) that seem to regard alcoholism as somehow socially acceptable.

Maya is: having an affair with a much older man – one of her professors – who clearly is actively trying to distance himself from her; working in a dead end job in a bookstore; permanently prolonging the completion of her thesis; struggling in her relationship with her dying mother.

Sharma herself has commented that “the [underlying] disease [of these symptoms] is Maya. Whatever shaped hole takes hold, drug-sized or food-sized or man-sized, at the end of the day, those are all symptoms of a void inside her.”

When almost simultaneously Peter leaves Maya and the older man break off their relationship, she spirals further out of control, losing her job and desperate for money to fuel her increasing dependence on drugs she starts “turning tricks” with men she finds on Craigslist before eventually overdosing and being held in a mental institution.

The book is written in a fragmentary style – with no chapters and largely consisting of either sharply honed dialogue or dark (and often darkly humorous) observations. The author has commented “it is supposed to be these passages of insight, humor, or observation, which is why the format is important. The “floating blocks” with spaces in between signal to the reader not to expect straight continuity. My favorite parts of books are the digressions or insights. Sometimes I skim over descriptions. My weakness is description, so I didn’t want to write a book where a lot of the writing would involve coming up with segues between actual scenes. I figured I’d just write the scenes or the dialogue.”

I was reminded most closely of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace” – but I preferred this book as I found it more nuanced and the humour much more finely honed. I also found it more balanced – Maya has a difficult relationship with her Mother, her husband and her parents-in-law but at the same time struggles with her feelings for them.

“Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, ‘What? I’m not doing anything.'”

This interview (from which my two quotes are taken) is particularly insightful

http://therumpus.net/2017/02/the-rump...

[Constantine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Genre:
Literary Fiction

I really enjoyed this debut novel. It is funny, strange, honest, vulgar, unshameful, sometimes over the top, sometimes subtle. Full of mixed feelings in a good way. The protagonist Maya is a non-apologetic cheater who cheats on her husband with a much older man and is also a drug addict! She is the bad protagonist who you will dislike her actions but will like her honesty. She is honest with the readers! Her voice just throws on you whatever she has in her mind.

There are several important subjects that this short novel tackles including, marriage, relationships, substance addiction, job security, divorce and life after marriage. Maya is not a likable character. There are many offensive things in this novel. The appeal for it is not wide. So recommending it to anybody would be a difficult task. This for sure is not the cup of tea of normal readers. Such a novel requires you to not just tolerate many trigger warnings but also to follow a protagonist who is nonapologetic about them, at least for the bigger portion of the story. The crude humor was very different than anything I have read before.

Grab this book at your own risk. All I can say that I enjoyed it a lot.

[Tommi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is an art to make you so unlovable.” In her debut novel, Problems, Jade Sharma portrays the life of a troubled young woman, Maya, living in a tiny New York apartment she’s bought with inherited money. She works in a book shop, and is unhappily married to Peter. She maintains an affair with an older professor of hers, Ogden, and is most of the time lost in a daze of Xanax, Suboxone, or heroin. None of the plot points invoke a necessarily original scenario, but Sharma’s power resides in the razor-sharp tongue of her protagonist: Maya’s voice is extremely incisive, frank, and fearless as we follow her day-to-day life, rooting for her on one level and despising some of her decisions on the other. Reading Problems becomes a game of sympathy or no sympathy, of irresistible diagnosis-making by the reader: what is Maya suffering from? What would make things better for her? Why did she do that?

Problems must also be one of the raciest novels I’ve read in a while, surely to poke a reaction even from thick-skinned readers. For the sake of some propriety, large parts of the novel cannot be quoted here. Bodily fluids are well represented, as are Maya’s wildest sexual dreams, and in all this Problems is a truly refreshing read, a text that is so open and direct that it’s hard to resist reading further, even with a face of mild disgust. It joins the ranks of authors such as Ottessa Moshfegh, whose newest novels My Year of Rest and Relaxation was coincidentally published around the same time as Sharma’s novel saw the light of the day in Europe, having been originally published in the US in 2016. The current decade has brought with it a bolder branch of feminism, and, as a result of that, a truer emancipation of female voices: raw, uncensored, as bodily as the writer wishes. Just as importantly, they offer truthful accounts of mental illness. We no longer need to hide both mental illness and disappointment in men in a symbolic manner à la The Yellow Wallpaper. Sharma and Moshfegh speak to our times, and, clearly, they have an audience.

As said, it is hard to resist diagnosing Maya. What first resembles the irony of a hipster turns into more serious existential nihilism, which then turns into self-destructive acts. Similarly, what begins as humorous feminist commentary on gender stereotypes, as she watches stereotypical sitcoms, soon gets much darker shades when she throws herself into the hands of dangerous men. Comedy shifts into near-tragedy: the dark humor is increasingly devoid of that latter word, and, in turn, Problems becomes a rather serious study of the psyche of a 21st-century urban woman.

Yet, of course, Maya’s eponymous problems are linked to the feminist issues that are more markedly present in the beginning of the novel. She is evidently oppressed by the patriarchal society she’s born in: “This was a dress you wore for your man to bend you over and bang you” is an example of the way she defines things around her through men. Luckily for Maya, she is aware of many of her problems: daddy issues are on the table, as is the generational gap between her and her mother:

She had my brother when she was just nineteen years old; like, what did she fucking know about anything? She’d never lived on her own. She went from her parent’s house to her husband’s house. Her husband. He wasn’t easy. She was so bright and crafty, and she could have lived a whole life and just been a glorified servant. Who could blame her for being nuts? Her father and her husband had deprived her of being a person. She was raised to believe the best thing to be was a wife and mother. It was so sad.

Thanks to her irritated state of mind, readers get to hear her snarky commentary on many things, including New York life:

You live in New York, and you’re so cool. You have an apartment in the East Village, and you call yourself an artist. But after a while, you forget what it was you were so excited about. There is nothing here for you. You feel like a sucker every day paying fourteen bucks for a pack of smokes. You take stock of your resources, and you don’t have anything. You call yourself an artist, but you work fifty million hours a week just to sleep in a room where only a bed fits. You go to bars where you can’t sit down or hear anyone talk. You’re a hipster in New York City. There are a million of you, and it doesn’t matter that you believe you’re talented, because no one cares and you’re only getting older. […] At what point do people hear ‘loser’ when you say ‘artist’?

It is absorbing to listen to Maya’s nihilistic, drug-infused comments, but fortunately there are also small apertures of light in her life. She has a hard time getting accustomed to Peter’s loving, Christian family, but at one point she is moved by his father’s remark on how they could all one day live at the parents’ house: “My eyes got wet. I wanted to burst into tears imagining how he must have thought about this and was naive and sweet enough to think of all of us living here like this forever.” When Sharma allows these moments, the effect is powerful, because they occur strategically seldom.

Problems is a fascinating, quick-paced read, told in short vignettes without chapter breaks. Not all of the one-liners quite work, but the well-realized main character more than makes up for the novel’s deficiencies. It does rise a question, however, that I still don’t know how to answer: at what point does it become sadistic to be engrossed by the suffering of others in this manner, even if we’re dealing with fiction? Is it catharsis we’re after, a purification of emotions through art? It seems an old-fashioned answer. Maybe Sharma is simply testing, and prompting, our ability to sympathize with all kinds of people:

Shit on the floor and puke in the toilet, or puke on the floor and shit in the toilet? I lay down on the cool tiles with my eyes closed. Get it together. Grow up. Get it together. Darkness. Self-loathing. Regret. I was an addict. I wasn’t an addict; I was just in a fucked-up situation. I was going to end up homeless. Everything would be fine. I needed to use a lifeline. I needed to ask the studio audience. I needed to phone a friend. [...] I let myself cry for a minute.

Written for the Helsinki Book Review.

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll be honest in that after finishing Sorry to Disrupt the Peace and now Jade Sharma's novel, I'm feeling a bit conflicted. Conflicted because they have each made me feel better about my own life, but awful because I found myself relating with each of their protagonists in really surprising ways considering I am like neither of the characters.

Here we have Maya, a young Indian-American woman who has, for lack of a better phrase, a slight drug problem. She's sleeping with a professor, but she herself is a married woman. She is, like Helen Moran in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, a really unlikable character. You want to smack her around a bit because all of the horrible choices she makes leads her to other, more horrible places. She doesn't like herself, and so we as the reader don't like her either, but it's not certain that she wants us to like her either. She's just telling her story, and we're along for the ride. And it's a bumpy right.

She buys a lot of drugs, she does a lot of drugs, she hangs out with a long of drug dealers and drug do-ers. She has sex - a lot of sex, a lot of irresponsible and questionable sex. She has an eating disorder though she never calls it by name. She hides the fact that she smokes cigarettes from her husband's family over Thanksgiving, though to be fair, smoking cigarettes is the tamest thing this young woman does.

We follow her to the bottom, and she hits bottom hard.

I'd like to say that she rises up from the ashes of hitting rock bottom, but that would be a lie. This still does not end on a hopeful note. Maya is probably a lost cause, based on these 180 pages, anyway.

Sharma's writing style is interesting, though somewhat annoying. She writes it all as though it's a blog entry, short brief paragraphs. I recently finished reading Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life which did something very similar. Maybe this is just how people write now, I don't know. I'm not really a fan, but to each their own.

Is this a feminist novel? I don't know. I'm still working that one out. One could argue that, well, Maya does whatever she wants which is very feminist. She says and does what she wants and feels the need only to hide her cigarettes. But this doesn't make her a good person, because, again, she makes a lot of questionably unfortunate choices throughout the book. She doesn't like herself. She says awful things about women (and men, to be fair). She has very little hope for anyone in the world. Her family are peripheral to her life, which is sort of accurate for someone in the throes of drug addiction, I think, so I feel she sort of nailed a lot of the issues a heroin addict does. (I say this with no personal experience whatsoever.)

I'm curious to see what else Sharma may write. I believe this is a debut novel (just like Patty Yumi Cottrell's Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. This book was readable in the way that some trainwreck of novels are. Not written horribly, but fuck, this is raw.

One word of warning, if you've made it this far - if you have certain triggers (drugs, sex, food, eating disorders, probably some other things I'm not thinking about right now), this book will likely trigger the fuck out of you.

[Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But then you grow up, and all the extras are real people. Like when you look down from a bridge and have to wrap your mind around how in each little toy car is a real person with a whole life. There are smart people everywhere. There are idiots everywhere. There is no order to it. There is no reason you're not dying in a cancer ward and some little kid is."

Generally speaking, there are two kinds of drug books: harrowing addiction narratives, and zany substance abuse romps à la Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac. It's usually men writing the second kind, probably because men are way more likely to build a personality from their own self-destructive tendencies and then assume everyone else finds it endearing.

Problems fits neither of those templates. The POV character, Maya, is addicted to heroin, but Jade Sharma takes the novel approach of writing her as a person: not a walking cautionary tale about the dangers of Bad Decisions, not a carefree hedonistic adventurer, just a multifaceted human woman who also happens to do hard drugs.

I mean sure, the drugs are still a big part of the book, arguably the biggest part. We see Maya buying, we see her using, we see her quitting, we see her withdrawing, we see her buying and using again. But unlike so many others who write on this stuff, Sharma neither romanticizes nor demonizes Maya for her habit. Maya uses because it makes her feel good and confident and free. And she wants to stop using because it eats away her time, her relationships, her dreams, makes her do selfish and hurtful things. She thinks a lot about how frequently she can use without it becoming a real problem, and strategizes how to get clean once she decides she's had enough. She's got a husband who's an alcoholic, and she makes a valid point about how his addiction is a socially acceptable one, even something to joke about, while everyone who does heroin is assumed to be perpetually at rock bottom, to have one foot already in a self-dug grave.

This is a slice-of-life narrative, in a similar vein (both stylistically and thematically) to something like Casey Plett's Little Fish . Maya lives in New York City with her husband Peter, the aforementioned alcoholic, who is... fine, a human being like her. She's also cheating on Peter with an older professor, an infidelity she rationalizes in the belief that Peter will grow tired of her eventually and leave anyway. There's a major episode at a Thanksgiving get-together with Peter's frugal, conservative parents (an agonizingly recognizable setting for me personally, almost a note-for-note reliving of some of my own visits home), and another in a clinic after Maya accidentally ODs. She does some sex work to pay the bills, she struggles with her weight and diet, she goes through ups and downs (mostly downs, admittedly) in her personal relationships, and she contemplates the always weird, sometimes amusing, usually fucked-up world around her.

It's that—the contemplation—that really makes this book sing. Sharma's not navel-gazey, but she's got a talent for sharp, concise, accurate little observations, and she wisely formats the novel (no chapter divisions, but a line break between almost every paragraph so the reader can dip in an out at will) to accentuate this skill. She's one of the most utterly honest writers I've ever come across: totally unafraid, apparently, of airing out whatever absolutely unglamorous thoughts and feelings come into her mind, the kind of stuff we all think but that most of us will only timidly acknowledge even to ourselves. It's not easy to be confronted with some of this stuff, but it's bracing and, I think, healthy. I've read some articles by people who knew Sharma personally, and they all talk about how bold she was. You'd have to be, to write like this.

How bold she was. You don't need me to tell you what that means, but it means that as of last fall Sharma is no longer with us on this disgusting, lovely planet. No more cutting observations, not more brutal, refreshing honesty. It's a shitty coda to a too-short life; this book, grimy and truthful and sincere, is what she left us to remember her by.

Sharma would have had something smart and funny to say about that, but I don't.

[Subashini · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Give me new problems. I'm tired of the same old problems.
Why can't someone interest me in my own life?"

This book is like Notes from Underground meets Trainspotting meets The Bell Jar, but with a brown woman. It's short but it's not easy; it got under my skin. An itch that won't go away. Or as The Rumpus describes it, it's "like a blister". I relate to Maya in terms of sensibility, but she's dealing with some harrowing issues like heroin addiction, an eating disorder, and the end of a marriage. She's an everywoman underground woman, if that makes sense. Even when I was laughing out loud I had a lump in my throat. There's no psychologising here about why Maya is the way she is. Instead, there is a suggestion that the promise of a life for many people, in this day and age, is just a combination of "dread and sadness and emptiness", but that it's never futile to try and make something else out of it.

"Life isn't short. Life is long. That's why you have to do something."

[Meredith Crawford · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mercifully short, mildly entertaining (in a flinch-y way) book about an abysmal person.

[Mel || mel.the.mood.reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

One thing about reading a book featuring a heroin addict… there will be a lot of shit and puke.

This was… okay? I feel a little bad going in on this one knowing the author passed away so young and Problems is clearly very thinly veiled autofiction, but so much of the writing was clunky and uninspired. Did we really need to use “fat” as the sole descriptor of three separate woman on a single page? I know the protagonist was grappling with serious dysmorphia and an eating disorder in addition to being an addict, but the overuse felt less about the character’s own internalized fat phobia and more just a sign of flat prose.

[BookishStitcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished 2 midterms yesterday and I got a 97 on one and an 88 on the other so today I'm taking a break having some fun and finishing up some books.

This book is so raw that it's hard to read. I kept waffling between giving it a 2 star and 4 star because I wasn't comfortable with a lot of the graphic stuff she covers, but the title is true to the book. Maya has problems lots and lots of them. Drugs, sex, school, job, eating disorder, marriage, affairs, and so much more. The author doesn't shy away from laying it all out there very raw, but also feeling very real.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this simply titled debut novel, "Problems" author Jade Sharma fully explores the disturbing psychological intensity of the inner emotional mindset and actions of a young woman impaired by an addictive personality and substance abuse that eventually split and fractured her life.

Maya, was an intelligent weight conscious twenty-something biracial beauty, who lived with her devoted bartender husband Peter in a sunless NYC basement apartment that had once been the scene of a murder-suicide. Working to complete her MFA, Maya seemed restless, bored, and edgy-- she had problems. Peter, she thought was an inattentive alcoholic with the same dull repetitious routine. As Maya began an affair with her English professor, Odgen Fitch, she rationalized she had never been faithful to anyone, and quoted: "For love to last, you have to have illusions or no illusions at all." (Lorrie Moore).

Sharma takes readers deeply into Maya's sexually obsessive/compulsive, irrational, flawed character--also her carefully concealed fondness for heroin. Maya managed the dope sickness with Suboxone: "I was so desperate for drugs it was hard to act casual. Like we were using this one last time. You have to pretend. That's why dealers are better. You don't have to pretend anything. Both of you want your s*** and get the f*** away from each other as quickly as possible."
Maya was barely able to maintain a normal life and keep her unlikeable, volatile, impulsive personality in check. Along with other long time employees at her bookstore job, Maya was laid off. Peter left her without warning, and Odgen ended their affair, insisting they be "just friends". Unable to sexually manipulate the men in her life, or blame others for her problems, Maya was forced to confront her deepest fears of abandonment, that led to her substance abuse. With additional therapy, Maya attempted to rebuild her life as a more stable, responsible, healthier single woman. ~ With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every generation needs a new young narrative voice to articulate the feelings of disaffection that come with that particular time. It feels like Maya, the narrator of Jade Sharma's debut novel, could be the outsider voice of this generation. Her marriage is inane. Her lover is distant. Her job at a bookstore is going nowhere. Her thesis is unfinished. Her mother is nagging. Her dope habit is getting worse. She's self-conscious about her body size, her skin colour and her distinctly non-PC sexual impulses. Her story has a streamlined candour to it whether she's articulating her desires “I liked feeling like a thing. I like feeling like nothing” or expressing the self-disgust which accompanies feeling overweight “The worst was to feel both fat and hungry.” We follow her journey as she spirals into ever more debased and degrading circles of behaviour and her struggle to find meaning and purpose. But this isn't presented in a self-pitying way. Rather, her narrative has a lucidity, wry humour and insight that acts as a touchstone which many people will be able to sympathize with and relate to even if their experiences are far different from Maya's.

Read my full review of Problems by Jade Sharma on LonesomeReader

[Varshita · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books where the author's words feel like a reflection of your own mind and that is scary because it's all out there but comforting at the same time because you know you are not the only one who thinks this way. The story of Maya as a drug addict's life is raw, funny, liberating and powerful all at the same time. Highly recommend.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's rare for me to finish a book so quickly, even one this short, but I would have finished this in one sitting if life and sleep and stuff didn't get in the way. Problems is a depressing and hilarious novel that is "about" so many things that's tough to say what it's actually about. Drug addiction? Toxic relationships? Being brown? Being a woman? Self-hatred? Marital fidelity? Prostitution? Yup, all of the above, and probably thirty-five other things I can't even remember. I guess the common thread throughout the book is Maya's perpetual feeling that she's slightly out of place or off track, constantly searching (in vain) for the right thing to do or say, always struggling to (figuratively and literally) get warm when she's freezing, or to cool down when she's burning up.

I can relate to approximately zero of the actual events of the book, but Maya's outlook and feelings, and the dark spirals of her inner dialogues, are so relatable it's almost jarring. The writing style is mostly rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness, but rather than being too scattered and random, the passages are surprisingly fluid and logical. I'm amazed that a book can be such a quick read and so easily digestible while still tackling a person's desperate search for purpose, among other ridiculously heavy subjects. I'm bummed I won't get to read any more books by Jade Sharma.

[LALa · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I don't really know what to say about this one. I instantly connected with Sharma's style of writing, and didn't want the experience to end. There was just something about the... heh I guess "rawness" for lack of better wording, that drew me in and its delivery.
Even though this book was kind of short, I had to take a pause while reading because in hoping there was more work to look forward to, I learned that Jade Sharma died last year (2019). The content of the book, and some events that happened in my own life, made it hit a bit harder. I of course wanted to finish reading though, however bittersweet it would be.

A couple of things that kind of struck me though, were the blurbs for it. I found it dark, raw, and I would say humorous instead of "very funny," which maybe some of it I didn't get because of my own feelings or whatever while reading or it was just part of marketing to get certain audiences to pay more attention to it at the time. Not to say that "very funny" works can't or don't also have depth, but I just felt like Problems was more than that, and the phrasing just struck me more as if it were describing some rom-com. However, I agree that it gives readers something different when it comes to addiction and recovery, as well as just what it is to exist in this world (Western society), and I kind of wish I had found it sooner.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone has their own form of literary comfort food and I guess mine is female narrators talking about their defects in an uncompromising way. This all started when I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, then other books which were similar began to creep in. I have mentioned them before but I will say that my favourite is Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.

Jade Sharma’s debut novel Problems is just the book I needed. Not only does it consist of a narrator who does not hesitate to talk about shit and piss but it also goes into other aspects of life such as addiction, and body shame.

Maya is fat, and somewhat bored of her relationship to her perfect husband, Peter. In fact she sleeps with a professor. She has a low paying job and is addicted to drugs, namely heroin (which she snorts)

When things start going awry, Maya starts to descend deeper into her habit until she goes to rehab, which does not work and she starts using again, knowing fully well that she is destroying herself. Nothing but problems.

Despite the seriousness of my description. Problems is a very funny book. Maya’s observational skills are perfect and for the first 150 pages, there are moments that will make the reader laugh loudly.

The last part is more dire, due to Maya’s descent into a drug vortex and managing to survive it. This section focuses on disease and how addiction can cripple a person. It’s more serious but drives the message home : drugs may seem to make life easy but they are difficult to control once they have their grip. in this process Maya also decides to sort out her major problem whether it works or not is something I would like to discuss in the comment section.

I thought Problems was a fantastic read. I haven’t laughed so loudly at a book in a long time. But do prepare to shed a couple of tears.

Unfortunately Jade Sharma passed away in last summer. Since this is her only novel it is a shame as I would have liked to see how she could have pushed her talent forward. Other than problems we just have to contend with her reviews.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. In a dirty, honest voice like that of Chloe Caldwell, with a large dollop of Otessa Moshfegh's blasé-style characters, Jade Sharma's Maya is an intoxicating mess to behold. She is a young woman in NYC, married to a man she just happened to end up with (4 years ago; married in Vegas), whose conservative family she can't stand (and vice versa), sleeping with a professor at the college she half-assed her way through (and then dropped the ball with re: her thesis). Though she's still making it to work at the bookstore, Maya does little else in the way of productivity or self-care as she starts to rely more and more on a $70-100/day heroin habit.

The choppy format of the text mimics the intensity of her addiction as she flounders. The best and most cringeworthy scenes involve the arguments with her mother, the phone/text/email conversations with her female friends as they all badmouth the men in their life, and, of course, Thanksgiving spent at her in-laws' place in Vermont. Though only 180 pages long, Maya's story still feels like a long and intricately woven warning (or maybe a step-by-step guide) of how to avoid/end up at rock bottom.

Her desperation both for coping more dope and never using again, drips off the pages as her self-awareness propels the scenes. At Thanksgiving it's most obvious: she pretends every time she steps out for a cigarette she's calling her mother, until 2 days later she realizes she likely reeks of withdrawal sweat and smoke and can drop the pointless ruse. Later as she begs her husband not to leave her, prostitutes herself to make enough rent and drug money, ends up at a psych ward after an OD labeled as a suicide attempt and gets temporarily clean the story spirals, and while at times is predictable (did we think she'd not succumb once more, again?), the language is not lacking imagination. The brutality of the words are the engine that kept me reading towards every new/old mistake Maya made, wondering: if she would make it to the end alive, if she really wanted to turn her life around, or if it was simply too late, Maya, a women like many, buried under too many problems to get out from beneath without sufficient help from the few people who stuck around.

I was disgusted and enthralled. I'd read anything else Jade Sharma wants to write.


A few favorite or admirable lines:

“Sometimes I didn’t know if I loved my husband. I didn’t know. It was marriage. Marriage is being, and sometimes you want to kill the person, and sometimes you feel the truth of a million clichés about having one real partner to grow old with when the world is cold and full of strangers. But most of the time I didn’t feel anything.”

“I didn’t know what to do when men gave me flowers. I would always think, Great, now I will have to watch these things die.”

“When the boring has become thrilling, you know you have wandered far off the path.”

“My mother was dying of MS. People actually did get sick out of nowhere and suffered for no reason. My mother suffered alone in rooms. My father died of a heart attack five years ago. It was a shock. I hadn’t realized he’d had a heart.”

“It is an art to make yourself so unlovable.”

“Tell a joke. Fake a smile. Everybody likes it when you tell a joke and fake a smile because they can see you’re at least trying. And that’s the main thing: to be trying.”

“Life isn’t short. Life is long. That’s why you have to do something.”

“Being alone, figuring out how to make the hours go, satiating your own wrestling human heart, means you never have to hide or be numb again.”

[Resh (The Book Satchel) · Rating 3 out of 5]

True to the name, this book is full of problems!! Maya is struggling with money, career, drug abuse, relationships with men and poor choices in the city of New York.

What to expect
- Maya's struggles on her path to destruction
- drug abuse and unhealthy relationships
- The book is written with no breaks. So it seems like we are in Maya's mind or rather talking to her, which perhaps is the best way to convey what Jade Sharma intended. I loved the format. It made me feel very connected to the character.


Not a happy book. But very realistic and unconventional with a unique protagonist. Worth a read. As the bottom line, you would not hate Maya, nor would you love her. She exists as just another flawed human being

Disclaimer : Much thanks to Tramp Press for a copy of the novel. All opinions are my own.


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[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Give me new problems. I’m tired of the same old problems.”

Maya is a part-time heroin user with full-time problems. Her marriage is doomed. She’s having an affair with a 61-year-old man. She has an eating disorder and mania and, oh yeah, the heroin.

When her marriage and her affair end around the same time, her life descends even further into chaos.

This book reminded me a lot of Trainspotting, from the subject matter to the cadence of the prose. It’s dark and raw and obscene. It’s also witty and hilarious and self-aware. It chronicles the cyclical nature of addiction and self-destructive behavior in a way that feels honest and true.

Underneath the gritty layers is a surprisingly hopeful narrative of a woman striving to live life on her own terms, if only those same old problems don’t kill her first.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, ‘What? I’m not doing anything.’ ”
This line is just one example of this author's really insightful, funny, yet tragic take on heroin addiction for a young woman in a high-tech, superficial world that starts very quickly closing in on her psyche. Unlikeable and selfish but highly engaging with an incredible talent for getting immediately to the raw truth of her own failings, as well as everyone else's, this is a really gritty, x-rated version of a lost soul not necessarily finding any redemption in her journey of darkness. Not for everyone, but I thought it was great.

[Tina Haibodi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be in my top 5 books of 2020. The way that Maya articulates satircally the desire to be ambitious and likable after years of solely seeking affirmation through overcompensation because of her immigrant parents' lack of affection was incredible. Recommended this to every fellow first-gen kid I know.

[Courtney Maum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this. And you will too if you liked "Love Me Back", "Tongue Party", "Making Nice" or "The Wetlands." Was totally engaged by the voice and remained very sympathetic to the narrator even while she was sabotaging herself.

[Chrisolu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Junkie by William S. Burroughs written with a feminist slant in brown skin. I enjoyed it so much, I want to read again.

[Aurore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of the best books I’ve ever read and it still haunts me to this day.

[Nella ☾ of Bookland · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.8 stars

"It is an art to make yourself so unlovable."

TW: drug abuse, eating disorder, very vulgar and obscene

This was quite a depressing read about a heroin and sex addicted woman named Maya who does literally everything known to man to sabotage her own life and then complains relentlessly about it for 180 pages. I have mixed feelings. This book is beyond gratuitous with its sex scenes, details of drug use, and disordered eating. On the one hand, I appreciated the rawness; it illustrated the magnitude of the damage Maya was doing to her life. On the other hand, the descriptions were self-indulgent to the point where I felt it was for shock value rather than being meaningful to the story.

I didn't "enjoy" this book in the traditional sense—Maya's life was too much of a bummer for that—but I was impressed by Sharma's writing, particularly her ability to make hopelessness, desperation, rage, helplessness, and pain jump off the page. It's not easy to write a character as unlikable as Maya. But then there's no real development or growth. She's just a miserable person who makes the worst possible decisions and stays angry at the world. So I'm not sure what point Sharma was trying to make ultimately; maybe it went over my head. Maybe there was no point? Perhaps Sharma just wanted to write a semi-stream of consciousness novel about a f*cked up woman.