The Need
Helen Phillips • 2019
Devastation Rating
psychological literary fiction philosophical
Our Take
A paleobotanist discovers impossible fossils and then an intruder who is also herself. Phillips writes motherhood as cult-like devotion — the rituals, the sleep deprivation, the obliteration of self. The doppelganger is the life she did not live, and the confrontation with it is existentially terrifying.
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