The Adjunct

The novel opens with a framing device: Sam, an adjunct professor, writes from under a desk in an adjunct office at Rosedale College in Baltimore during a cold December night. An adjunct is a part-time lecturer hired on short-term contracts, and Sam has been one for two years. She writes not out of ambition but out of a desire for catharsis and an attempt to understand how she ended up here.

The narrative shifts to a hot August day when Sam arrives at Rosedale, a private liberal arts college, for new-teacher orientation, only to learn that adjuncts are excluded. Dr. Brighton, the head of the Literature Department, hired Sam the day before to replace a professor who broke his hip. Sam desperately needs the work: She has $96 in her bank account, is four months behind on rent, and carries significant student loan debt.

While looking for Dr. Brighton's office, Sam discovers that Tom Sternberg, her former graduate school adviser at Samuel Hudson University (SHU), now teaches at Rosedale. Tom's celebrated debut novel, Ten Four, was published when he was 29, but he never produced a second book. At SHU, Tom led the creative writing track Sam entered with the goal of writing a novel. He praised her work extravagantly, calling her "a real writer," and she believed every word.

Sam meets Sophie, another adjunct at Lewis, the public college where Sam also teaches. Sophie is politically outspoken and organizing adjuncts to unionize. The two develop a friendship in 15-minute intervals between classes. Sam's schedule is punishing: 13 classes per week across two campuses, requiring roughly 65 hours of weekly preparation, with first paychecks not arriving until the end of September.

Aliana Williams, a former SHU classmate who has published a bestselling novel and holds a tenure-track position (a probationary job leading toward permanent academic status), gives Sam a ride between campuses. Aliana implies it is strange that Sam would work at Rosedale and tells Sam to "let it go now." Sam is bewildered, then discovers that Tom has a new novel coming out: Casualty, about a professor forced into retirement after a short-lived affair with a younger female student. The synopsis includes details Sam recognizes from her own life, including sex toys she found while house-sitting Tom's dog.

Back at Sam's apartment after a night out, Sam and Sophie have a spontaneous sexual encounter. Sam reflects on her sexuality, which she experiences as abstract and shifting, resisting pressure to categorize herself.

At Tom's prepublication reading at Rosedale, Aliana accuses Sam of attending despite "the book" and lectures her about reframing personal failure through MeToo rhetoric. Sam meets Gabe, a visiting assistant professor (a temporary fixed-term faculty position) at Rosedale of mixed Taiwanese and European American heritage. Sam brings Gabe home, and they have sex, though she maintains emotional distance, telling him to "pretend I'm not anyone specific."

A journalist named Leslie Chen calls Sam about her exit interview at SHU, during which Sam was asked about Tom's conduct under the university's Title IX sexual-misconduct reporting process. Sam recalls answering ambiguously and now realizes the response may have been treated as a formal complaint that triggered Tom's departure from SHU.

Financial disasters compound through the fall. Sam's toothache becomes a dental emergency requiring a $1,200 root canal. Her car window is shattered in a break-in that destroys her late father's Simon & Garfunkel cassette. She loses two spring classes at Lewis because she took two business days to respond to an email during her health crisis.

The New York Times Style section publishes a profile in which Tom confesses to a consensual sexual relationship with a former graduate student. Former SHU students describe a peer who pursued Tom relentlessly. The article mentions a Title IX complaint that was filed and then withdrawn. Sam is devastated: The article is full of lies, because she never slept with Tom.

A flashback reveals what actually happened. During her second semester of grad school, Tom confided in Sam about his affair with his wife Lydia's best friend. One night, he invited Sam to his house and made sexual advances. When Sam froze, Tom rejected her angrily, demanding she "take some responsibility" for being there, and called her a cab. Afterward, he told colleagues Sam was switching to the academic track before she had decided to, and his criticism of her writing became so devastating that she abandoned fiction entirely.

Sam's living situation collapses when her roommate Brianna discovers bedbugs and forces Sam out. She moves onto Sophie's couch, but their friendship strains under proximity. Sam discovers that Sophie's parents are Hollywood screenwriters, and tension builds over their differing class positions.

At a Thanksgiving potluck at Dr. Brighton's house, Sam learns that a retiring professor's position has been posted. Gabe has applied without telling her, and she was never notified because adjuncts are excluded from the department listserv. Aliana breaks down, and Sam tells her the truth: She never slept with Tom, and his real affair was with Lydia's best friend Claire. Aliana reveals that Mateo, the SHU department head, helped orchestrate Tom's move to Rosedale to avoid institutional fallout.

Sam pieces together why Tom lied. When Lydia found Sam at Tom's house, she assumed Tom was sleeping with Sam, and Tom let her believe it rather than reveal the real affair with Claire. Removing Sam from his creative writing program proved to Lydia he was keeping his distance while protecting his ego. Tom even knew the journalist personally, making the published profile a controlled narrative.

After the dinner, Gabe confronts Sam about her emotional distance, telling her he feels "extraneous," as though he "could be anyone." Sam recognizes a pattern: She treats people as replaceable because she herself has always been treated as replaceable. Their relationship ends. Soon after, Sam and Sophie's friendship fractures over mutual accusations of class hypocrisy, and Sam packs her belongings and leaves.

In the final chapter, Sam narrates from the present of the framing device. She has been living in the adjunct office for days, washing in the building's bathroom, applying for jobs. At a bookstore, she runs into Gabe, who is leaving for a postdoctoral position, a temporary post-PhD research appointment, in Germany. Their goodbye is tender but final. Dr. Brighton catches Sam in the office, discovers manuscript pages taped to the wall, and orders Sam to leave. On Christmas Eve, Sam is carjacked at gunpoint while sleeping in her car.

Sam reads Casualty at the public library, confirming it reimagines her as a sexually aggressive student who pursued the professor and later reframed regret as misconduct. She types her own manuscript, the account that constitutes this novel, in an email to herself. Walking through Baltimore, Sam encounters a three-story mural of the drag queen Divine painted with the words "I'm So Beautiful." The sight moves Sam to tears; she understands it as an act of defiance, taking what others criticize and making it one's own.

Desperate and alone on Christmas Eve, Sam finds Tom on Tinder. They match. She plans to go to his house, disconnect from her body as she has learned to do through years of precarious labor, and exchange sex for shelter, warmth, and a meal with the man who destroyed her career. The novel ends with Sam's insistence on clarity: She will go to Tom's house and do what she has described. She names this her "one sad, secret power," the ability to be "unspecific, even to myself."