Saying that I really, really loved Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life makes me feel a little bit creepy. There isn’t much happy in the life of our unnamed narrator who talks about her life while being locked up in an asylum that has apparently been abandoned.

Unnamed Narrator has not had it easy. She was found in a shoe box near an orphanage as a baby and spent her childhood bouncing from foster home to orphanage and back again. She’s often homeless and has the hapless luck of ending up in the company of people who want use and abuse her — physically, mentally, and sexually. It’s kind of horrifying, and yet the book is tender and beautiful at the same time.

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