Literally Show Me a Healthy Person

TV writer and Twitter personality Wilder’s debut novel is a small, strange gem that delivers an intense emotional experience. Readers are presented with the thoughts and memories of a young narrator—also named Darcie—whose quips, queries, brainstorms, and anecdotes churn around a core narrative of her dysfunctional family, sustained grief, and loneliness. Readers might initially dismiss Darcie as emotionally immature and artificially blasé, but Wilder balances her casual style with an underlying tenderness and vulnerability that elevates Darcie from a millennial stereotype to a unique and sympathetic personality. Darcie wants to love and be loved, and as her family history—a violent divorce, a dead mother, an ill-suited father, a mentally ill brother, a very strange uncle—is revealed, her unsuccessful relationships and feelings of isolation become understandable, even inevitable. Darcie’s voice sparkles with black humor, righteous indignation, and probing intellect. Careening from fierceness to tenderness, from bleakness to humor, she wrestles her demons as best she can, drawing the reader in with her honesty and vulnerability. This short work is deceptively structured to appear chaotic and random, and can be torn through in one sitting or taken in by small doses. Wilder’s wonderful debut is a bold view of the psyche of a contemporary young woman. (Mar.)