The Nix

"This is the story of Samuel Andresen-Anderson. Of the boy who became him and the man that he is in 2011 — obsessed with an online game called World Of Elfscape and failing at pretty much everything else. But when the mother who abandoned him as a child suddenly reappears on every TV screen in America as a viral sensation, throwing rocks at a conservative politician, he is given a chance to write a book about her in which he must savage his own mother in lurid, tell-all fashion. It’s a job he takes, of course. Because he’s furious. And desperate. Nathan Hill’s digressive, scattershot exploration of the boy, the man, his mother and the times that shaped them is a brilliant, heartbreaking glimpse into just one of the casualties that time and memory make of us all."