"Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You "is the story of James Sveck, a sophist
icated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea
how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Ma
nhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions t
hat govern the adult world around him including the expectation that he will go
to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town
somewhere in the Midwest. "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You" takes place
over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathe
tic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, a
nd devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older c
oworker. Nothing turns out how he'd expected.
