Everything Here Is Under Control

About the book

Amanda is a new mother, and she is breaking. After a fight with her partner, she puts the baby in the car and drives from Queens to her hometown in rural Ohio, where she shows up unannounced on the doorstep of her estranged childhood best friend. Amanda thought that she had left Carrie firmly in the past. After their friendship ended, their lives diverged radically: Carrie had a baby the summer after high school, became a successful tattoo artist, and never escaped Ohio’s conservative grid of close-cut grass. But the trauma of childbirth and shock of motherhood compel Amanda to go back to the beginning and to trace the tangled roots of friendship and family in her own life.

Compelling and engaging, Everything Here Is under Control is a raw, honest, occasionally hilarious portrait of the complexity, conflicting emotions, and physical trauma of both modern motherhood and the intense, intimate friendships that women forge in their youth.

Praise for this book:

"Brutally tender, ferociously intimate, astonishingly surefooted, and deeply satisfying. Emily Adrian has crafted a multilayered story whose people -- I hesitate to call them mere 'characters' -- became so real and vivid to me that I've thought about them long since finishing the book. An immersive, irresistible pleasure." - Chelsey Johnson

"A sharp, thoughtful, poignant look at early motherhood, a small town, and the complex, challenging, and beautiful relationships that make up our families both biological and chosen." - Lydia Kiesling

"I tore through Everything Here Is under Control in just a couple of days, compelled by its refreshingly honest portrayals of not only early motherhood but the kind of childhood friendship that shapes the rest of your life. Emily Adrian writes with such a keen and sensitive eye, and she's funny, and she is an astute observer of human behavior. I cheered when I got to the plot twist midway through, and, even now, I can't get this novel's characters out of my mind." - Edan Lepucki

"Warm, compassionate, funny, and filled with surprises, Everything Here Is Under Control is an accomplished novel by a writer to watch." - Brian Morton

"How Emily Adrian could write a book so honest and raw about the first weeks of motherhood and yet so appealing and unputdownable and -- dare I say, heartwarming -- is a mystery of novelistic alchemy. Nonetheless, there it levitates: light as a feather and heavy as a stone, a romantic comedy that redefines the terms of traditional romance and takes happily ever after far beyond the loss of maidenhood. Magic, addictive, brilliant fun." - Rufi Thorpe

"Emily Adrian is such a uniquely perceptive writer, possessing a kind of X-ray vision that finds the hidden truths inside of us, no matter how painful they might be. Everything Here Is Under Control skillfully lays out a story that converges on motherhood, friendship, and our responsibilities to the world around us, the lives that touch us. A beautiful, bracing novel by an amazing, open-hearted writer." - Kevin Wilson