Chaise

“I resolve to sit down on my couch and never get up. Please don’t call.”

Overwhelmed with the endless brainwashing advertisements and memes that society has pumped into her psyche since childhood, a woman sits down on her couch and doesn’t get up for years. What is real? What is normal? Is it possible to have a single original thought? Rather than accepting her mental break as something that must be fixed, she embraces the moment and refuses to go outside until she is ready—which may be never.

In recorded conversations with herself that are mailed off to her therapist, her growing obsession with her couch is revealed as it expands to encompass not only her entire apartment but also the condo next door. Cut off from the outside world, she picks through the hypocrisy of her life and tries to make sense of the moments that brought her to this place of self-imposed invalidism.

Chaise, the debut novel from Becci Noblit Goodall, is a meditative indictment of the modern world.