This surprising diaristic novel follows a young woman named Lauren who opens her tale with a dispatch from her mother’s womb, in 1989, musing about how the world will see “a proper lockdown”—as in the Covid-19 pandemic—some 31 years later, but that we all begin life in one. The novel that follows charts Lauren’s childhood, student years, and early adulthood, her thoughts, desires, and observations about everyday life (“Is it a fact of life that only mothers can cope with poo,” she wonders), as Lauren recounts happy times with her wealthy family, charts their prodigious intake of Prosecco and cigarettes, muses on the friendships she attempts to maintain even as everyone ages and seemingly grows apart, and considers all that she can become as she excels in school amongst her peers.

Early on, Lauren seizes on the idea, floating in the family, that she could one day be a movie star, and Lauren takes steps in that direction, enrolling in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. But Lauren's life is changed forever when tragedy strikes and she is forced to grow up fast and adjust to her new normal. Nicholson eschews conventional scenecraft and pacing for summarized reports of Lauren’s experiences that sound like actual diary entries (antsy budgeting; kisses noted; movies logged as viewed). Eight Mile High paints the emotional life and the everyday detail of a determined and intelligent young girl with insight and some playful wit. The novel’s present is like a fog of feeling from which milestones and adversities suddenly emerge or vanish; the storytelling emphasizes how choices become habits and fates become sealed.

Those unusual choices, plus a tendency toward long paragraphs, diminish narrative, though the story, turning on inheritances and what sense Lauren can make of what others want of her, builds to surprising, even noir-ish twists. Eight Miles High covers wide swathes of a young woman’s learning how to live, from crawling to surviving Los Angeles.

Takeaway: A young star-to-be’s surprising coming-of-age, in experimental journal form.

Comparable Titles: Alissa DeRogatis’s Call it What You Want, Bethany C. Morrow's So Many Beginnings.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: N/A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: C
Marketing copy: C