"I'm in awe of this book. In a fictionalized inner travelogue, Rebecca van Laer writes fearlessly about life, writing, love, and loneliness, with exquisite attention to detail. This is a book about the various forms of armour we wrap ourselves in-most especially the armor of identity-and about what we think we're protecting. This is a book about how big our desires are and how big we believe they can be. Like Maggie Nelson's Bluets and Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be, van Laer takes so-called 'women's writing' and opens it up, showing us what exists beyond cliché and easy answers."

-Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere and What Are You

"In How to Adjust to the Dark the narrator seeks, grieves, and invents love in a series of vignettes interwoven with poems and literary self-analysis. This book is about the pain that comes with living by trial and error; there's really no other way to do it. I felt seen by Charlotte's relationship with writing. I couldn't stop reading, though I wanted to look away at times. Van Laer reminds us of how embarrassing and brave and beautiful it is to write, how our own words become life rafts. They are impermanent, silly, and wholly necessary."

-Shannon McLeod, author of Whimsy

"...a very personal exploration of the artist as a young woman, through a Salingeresque world of academia, therapy, prescription drugs, street drugs, failed relationships, poetry and self-discovery. I read it all in one day with photographs of Anaïs Nin and Edward Albee and Donna Tartt in my periphery. If only there'd been a photo, too, of Sylvia Plath on my wall, all would have been right in my world! "

-Elizabeth Ellen, author of Person/a and Her Lesser Work

"A touching, and resilient collection on art and desire, told in a hybrid of poems and prose-think: VH1 Behind the Music for Rebecca van Laer's poetry. Craigslist hookups, sunshine, pain, love and liquor and vomit."

- Bud Smith, author of Teenager