Blair Sorrel Releases New Book

Blair Sorrel’s A Schizoid at Smith: How Overparenting Leads to Underachieving isn’t your typical coming-of-age memoir. It’s raw, sometimes uncomfortable, and almost painfully honest. Sorrel charts her time as a student at Smith College through the lens of someone who never really fit in—socially, emotionally, or academically. The book is less about the quaint traditions and leafy quads of a historic women’s college, and more about what happens when a young adult, shaped by suffocating parental involvement, is suddenly left to her own devices.

What immediately stands out is Sorrel’s voice—wry, skeptical, and deeply self-aware. She doesn’t sugarcoat what it feels like to spend four years on the outside looking in. Her descriptions of campus life are sharp and, at times, almost clinical. You can sense how her upbringing—hovering parents, relentless pressure to achieve, and an expectation of constant self-improvement—left her both overprepared for structured tasks and utterly unequipped for the messiness of real life.

The book’s exploration of schizoid personality traits—emotional detachment, difficulty connecting, the preference for solitude—feels both personal and universal. Sorrel ties her struggles to larger trends: helicopter parenting, the cult of achievement, and the anxiety epidemic on college campuses. There’s a sense of frustration and sadness running beneath the surface, but also a kind of relief in naming the problem out loud.

But the book isn’t all bleak. Sorrel’s dry humor keeps things from getting too heavy, and her moments of insight—about the limits of therapy, the double-edged sword of academic excellence, and the hollowness of performative “wellness”—are genuinely thought-provoking. She’s not offering easy answers or five-step solutions. Instead, she’s offering a cautionary tale: that love, when tangled up with control and expectation, can stifle more than it nurtures.

If you’re looking for an uplifting campus novel, this isn’t it. But if you want a sharp, unsentimental look at what overparenting can do to a young person’s sense of self, A Schizoid at Smith is worth your time. It’s the kind of book you’ll think about long after you put it down, especially if you’ve ever felt like you were living someone else’s plan for your life.

Nicole Killian