Self-care is a marketing gimmick, and thus a favored object of critique. Still, I want to know what I’m missing. In the novel, as in most writing about the term, there’s a nod toward self-care’s origins in the work of activist Audre Lorde, who wrote, in her essay collection A Burst of Light, that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Stein’s book did not include, though it easily could have, the subsequent complications of that particular quotation—namely, that it comes at the end of a grueling diary of Lorde’s experiences with breast cancer, which would eventually take her life. In Lorde’s diary, the details of caring-for-self are not as clear as the motivating force behind it: laying claim to the life you have. Dying from cancer is outside her control, but living despite it is not.

 “How do I want to live the rest of my life,” a 1985 entry opens, “and what am I going to do to ensure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.” 

Questions of how to make the most of your life become pointed when mortality is no longer an abstraction. Reframed thus, self-care might be thought of as the newest form of the art of living well, the understanding of a good life that exists in the particular balance of structure and spontaneity, a practice that encompasses both discipline and indulgence.

Waking up early, eating healthy food, journaling, and exercise are all self-care as much as ordering in, treating yourself to a nicer bottle of wine, watching a trashy movie, or taking a long bath. It’s about tending to the human body like an animal: listening to what makes it happy, and what makes it not. This definition is still compatible with intense self-absorption. In Stein’s novel, Devin, one of the women at its center, spends her time drifting from treatment to treatment, colon cleansing, going to workouts, and otherwise meticulously tending to herself.