How do you explain that sometimes it feels good to hurt?

In her sophomore year of college, Kara Winterson is coming undone. She's not speaking to her best friend Shush, her boyfriend Eric broke up with her, and she's on the verge of losing her scholarship.

But she's fine. Really, she's fine.

She'll avoid Shush and the rumors she's spreading about a predatory professor, get Eric back, and somehow not fail out of college. She'll cope the way she always has. With the sharp edge of a razor blade writing stories into her skin.

Until Shush reveals a terrible secret and the one way Kara has learned to hold herself together becomes what tears her apart. And somewhere in the wreckage of everything she thought she knew, she starts the hardest thing she's ever done: writing herself a new story.

In her debut novel, author Erin Lodes explores one girl's story of self-harm and self-identity, informed and shaped by her own mental health struggles.