Who wouldn’t want to live a life free of capitalist venality and inequality?

In her new book, Heaven Is a Place on Earth, essayist Adrian Shirk explores her quest for utopic living. Structured into loose sections that race through memoiristic passages and long historical interludes about utopian communities, Heaven also includes short pages of notes Shirk made during her search for bliss — a journey prompted in large part by feeling trapped in a life she didn’t want after her father-in-law, Dan, fell into and then came out of a coma, leaving Shirk and her husband, Sweeney, to serve as his primary caretakers. The situation pressurizes Shirk’s personal life and exacerbates existing problems in her relationship with Sweeney.

For much of the book, Shirk seems desperate, following her obsession with utopian communities around like a dog chasing the scent of a long-discarded meal. She talks to, among others, Shakers and Bruderhofs; she recounts the history of the religious community Rajneeshpuram; she reflects on her own family’s settler-colonial roots in Oregon and frets about what that might imply about her “white privilege”; she plots with friends to varying degrees of seriousness and confesses her own desire for utopia to anyone who will listen. Shirk’s prose is at times imprecise, tending toward romanticization whenever she recalls moments of her life preceding the book’s immediate time frame. While frustrating, this style ultimately amplifies the sensation of desperation, of the yanking impossibility that undergirds any search for an answer that doesn’t exist.