“She thought, maybe later you’ll remember this and think when you were young, you were carefree, everything was possible, but that’s not what it was actually like.”

From the bestselling, Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Rest of Our Lives comes a novel about beginnings: the stories we tell ourselves about how we’re supposed to grow up, and what happens when we discover they might not be true.

Lisa is a bookish girl. Growing up in Austin, she thinks life will be like it is in the pages of books. But it turns out, life is so much more. It’s harder, trickier, more beautiful, wider and wilder, full of choices big and small.

When Lisa goes to college, falls in love, begins graduate school, gets married, has a kid—when she starts living what looks like Real Life—the rules she always lived by begin to blur. And as Lisa moves into adulthood, she faces the tricky tests of young marriage and aging parents and ambition and family. Lisa thought once she gets going in life, it would all fall into place, and instead she has to start out over and over again.
Starting Out is a story about the tough beauty of growing pains and the profound awareness of the choices that shape a life.