Officially the Worst Year Ever (Again) is a coming-of-age novel about surviving yourself. On the surface it's about a 22-year-old Black woman named Kali Osei who moves to New York with a Fine Arts degree and proceeds to have one of the most eventful, humiliating, heartbreaking, and quietly triumphant years a person can have. Two bosses. Two firings. One good man she let go. One married man she didn't know was married until the olive oil aisle of a Whole Foods on a Sunday. A kitchen ceiling that fell while she wasn't in it. A one-way train ticket to Oregon. But underneath all of that it's really about something quieter and more universal - the specific experience of being at the beginning of your adult life and discovering that the city, the job, the relationship, the plan - none of it is going to hand you yourself. That you have to build that separately, in the margins, in the sketchbooks, on the long walks home from difficult things.