The narrator of Miranda July’s debut novel, “The First Bad Man” is a strange, ostensibly mousy middle-aged woman named Cheryl. Cheryl works at a nonprofit that teaches self-defense to women. She attends “color therapy” for a chronic globus hystericus (lump in the throat). She pines for a baby she fell in love with when she was nine, a baby whose soul is now reincarnated in various other babies Cheryl sees around town. She lusts for an elderly man who in turn lusts for a 16-year-old girl, and who texts Cheryl for permission to commit increasingly felonious acts with her. Surrounded by people who fail to demonstrate even the smallest measure of decency, Cheryl allows her bosses to send their child, an ill-mannered 20-year-old amazon named Clee, to live with her rent-free. Cheryl gags at Clee’s foot odor and her housekeeping; their relationship turns violent. They form a Fight Club a deux which devolves into a feverish sexual obsession and ends, surprisingly, with a pregnancy.
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