Konkka confronts the temptations and contradictions of conventional success. The unmarried and unemployed narrator of this novel is having a relationship with a married man and must, under the terms of her social security, apply for jobs and go to interviews. Her life, as she notes with both insight and humour, is founded on unsustainable contradictions. As her lover is recommitting to his wife and as her poverty becomes increasingly dire, she confronts the temptations and contradictions of conventional success. This precise and intensely personal novel describes the narrator's growing sense that freedom becomes itself a kind of routine and her burgeoning desire to break out of it.