The novel is narrated by Mina, a forty-five-year-old Iranian American woman living alone in Edinburgh, where she has deliberately constructed a small, low-cost, low-ambition life after years of elite education, corporate work, marriage, bereavement, and psychological collapse. At the beginning, Mina believes she may finally have discovered happiness through chemistry. A new antidepressant, mirtazapine, dramatically changes her experience of the world: she sleeps deeply, finds books intoxicating again, notices sunlight and food and strangers, and becomes intensely hungry and sexual. The downside is that she cannot stop eating and begins gaining weight. Mina, who spent her youth in environments obsessed with discipline, productivity, achievement, and appearance, tries to decide whether being physically heavier matters if she is genuinely happier. Her thoughts constantly return to her dead father, Baba, an Iranian dentist who used opium, read poetry, meditated, and seemed to Mina, in retrospect, to have discovered a much simpler formula for pleasure than the one she was taught. Mina also remembers Ewan, her Scottish university boyfriend and later husband, and Claire, her closest friend from Harvard and McKinsey. All three were once ambitious young people who allowed work to consume almost every part of their lives. Mina now sees that existence as a kind of collective madness. She works only enough hours as a ghostwriter and editor to support herself and spends the rest of her time reading, walking, eating, thinking, and pursuing pleasure.
Mina begins visiting Glenogle, an old Edinburgh swimming bath and sauna, where she becomes fascinated by a loud, uninhibited older woman she initially nicknames Betty and later learns is Maisie. Maisie is messy, intrusive, vulgar, funny, lonely, and notorious for bringing food, hair products, masks, juices, and other forbidden things into the sauna, causing an escalating series of rules to appear on the walls. Mina is initially embarrassed by her, but the two gradually become friends. She also becomes friendly with Martin, an older regular, and develops a crush on a beautiful young sauna-goer she calls Angus before discovering that his real name is Colin. Colin teaches Brazilian jiujitsu nearby. Mina’s newly awakened libido sends her onto Feeld, where she experiments with younger men and with increasingly specific fantasies about being looked at, judged physically, restrained, and overpowered. Many encounters go badly. She meets Jamie, a kind widower close to her own age, but recoils because he represents the mature, age-appropriate intimacy she does not want. A muscular stranger whom she asks to wrestle and dominate her becomes disturbed and angry when the encounter does not proceed as he imagined. A songwriter named Bennie comes over to “assess” her naked body, but Mina ultimately prefers sleeping beside him to having sex. These episodes reveal that Mina is not simply looking for sex: she wants play, attention, bodily intensity, and temporary intimacy without rebuilding the kind of conventional couplehood she once had.
At the same time, Mina signs up for jiujitsu lessons with Colin. What begins partly because she is attracted to him becomes one of the book’s most important relationships. Colin is around twenty-five, serious about the sport, and initially careful about professional boundaries. Mina constantly jokes, flirts, touches things she should not, and tests those boundaries, while Colin slowly becomes comfortable enough to joke back. The sport gives Mina what ordinary sex often fails to provide: physical struggle intense enough to silence her analytical brain. She likes being thrown, pinned, bruised, and forced to react instinctively. One session becomes emotionally disastrous after Mina misses doses of sertraline, the antidepressant she switches to because she cannot tolerate mirtazapine’s appetite effects. Colin puts her into a choke, Mina panics, and years of suppressed grief explode out of her. She sobs on the mat. Colin does not mock her; instead, their awkward client-coach arrangement gradually becomes an actual friendship. Mina begins cooking for him, teasing him, and relying on him as one of the people who can handle her emotional volatility.
