"The Tantrum turns its blazing attention on the most intimate precincts of a life—marriage and motherhood, twinhood and friendship, ambition, desire, grief. Jean Garnett is a born essayist: for her, language is an instrument for mulling and shaping, for thinking and rethinking; the results are fierce, funny, and relentlessly self-implicating, the voice on the page always good company. I couldn't put it down." —Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

A portrait of intimacy and upheaval that uses personal stories of marriage, separation, twinhood, parenting, sex, and money to explore the tension of being both subsumed into others and alone.

After an experiment in nonmonogamy upends her life, calling into question every choice she has made and everything she has believed about herself, Jean Garnett gropes her way toward a new kind of existence is this intense, funny, aching account of a woman's breakdown. Dissecting her closest entanglements and her most frightening feelings, Garnett explores marriage, separation, sex, twin sisterhood, money, heartbreak, parenthood, and the problem of what to do with the emotions that overwhelm us. An unflinching study of need, envy, infatuation, depression, and the sudden and mystifying ways our identities can change, The Tantrum is about the relationships that define, destroy, and sustain us, and about trying—perhaps unsuccessfully—to find oneself as a single being.