Every young feminist, at some point, bumps up against the limits of her ideals. For me, it happened in my early 20s. My consciousness freshly raised and my mind spongier than ever, I spent my evenings imbibing the no-nonsense feminism of Vivian Gornick, the big-hearted feminism of bell hooks, the caustic feminism of Virginie Despentes. On the page, I underlined their wisdom about forging romances rooted in equality and embracing solidarity with other women; yet in life, I chased the approval of apathetic men and harbored resentment for my beautiful, successful peers. I had done all the reading but felt that I was failing the test.

The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s sharp-witted novel Theory & Practice, a Sri Lankan–born grad student at a university in Melbourne, has a similar, self-flagellating feeling early in the book. She has discovered that her boyfriend is cheating on her, and, to her horror, she wants the other woman—“a smart, good-looking, outspoken feminist”—dead. “I’d raged silently, inwardly,” she recalls, “censored by an internal critic who found jealousy a trite, despicable emotion, a morbid symptom that ran counter to feminist practice.” She is immediately ashamed of her reaction. Yet maybe her lapses and mine were not moral failings but case studies in what de Kretser (who, like her narrator, is Australian and was born in Sri Lanka) calls the inevitable “breakdowns between theory and practice.” Feminism is a set of political principles, not social prescriptions. Ideology rarely maps neatly onto everyday existence—and it’s in these gaps that we learn the most about who we are, what we believe, and what we really want.

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The novel begins in 1986, when the narrator has just moved from Sydney to Melbourne to write a thesis about gender roles in the late novels of her hero, Virginia Woolf. Invigorated by the promise of a life of the mind, she buys a dress in a color she describes as “Intellectual Black.” She gets an apartment in a vibrant bohemian enclave bursting with scholars and artists that sits a few steps from the beach. The nearby ocean becomes a model for the kind of knowledge she seeks: something to “carry me beyond the limits of myself,” even at “the risk of drowning.” But in truth, there is no escaping oneself—no city, no dress, no course of study with the power to liberate a person from who they really are.

Not long after breaking up with her boyfriend, the narrator starts sleeping with Kit, a wealthy engineering student with an equally wealthy girlfriend, Olivia. Their trysts are aboveboard, Kit says, because he and Olivia have “a deconstructed relationship.” The narrator convinces herself that she’s fine with this. She’s a “modern woman,” she thinks, “perfectly content with his body’s undeconstructed need of mine.” But that idealized self buckles under erotic strain, and the narrator soon grows obsessed with Olivia: She fantasizes about breaking into her apartment and leaves marks on Kit’s body before she sends him back to her. In a nod to the epistemic value of their dalliance, Kit and the narrator refer to sex as “studying.” Since her thesis involves thinking critically about gender roles, what better way to study than to participate in a three-sided heterosexual power struggle?

As the narrator discovers, neither our politics nor our principles preclude—or protect us from—unwieldy emotions, embarrassing impulses, or subconscious desires. What’s more, the love triangle forces her to tussle with questions of not only gender but also class. A brown-skinned, first-generation immigrant, she’s opposed to Kit and Olivia’s inborn privilege and the socioeconomic stratification that enforces it; she also wants what they have. “I wanted to join the bourgeoisie,” she says, “and I wanted to destroy it.” The two truths coexist, however uneasily, rather than canceling each other out.

The narrator’s research into Woolf, whose picture she tapes above her desk, reveals another fissure between her ideals—namely, the writer she looks up to—and reality. Woolf looms large in her imagination not only as a pathbreaking feminist writer but also as a fellow survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Reading Woolf’s diary, the narrator is moved by her description of the inner turmoil that lingers after an experience of harm. “What is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling?” Woolf writes. The narrator recognizes the sentiment: “Dumb, mixed feelings,” she muses, “are knowledge that lives outside language and outside time.”

But the narrator faces mixed feelings of a different kind when she reads another diary entry, in which Woolf cruelly describes the Sri Lankan national hero E. W. Perera as a “poor little mahogany coloured wretch.” It feels like a painful, personal blow. How to account for this wrinkle in her image of the beloved author? Again, by holding two truths simultaneously. The “Woolfmother,” as the narrator calls her, is both an intellectual giant and a blatant racist. A friend suggests that instead of abandoning her study of Woolf, the narrator enter into a conversation with her blighted hero. The friend’s prescription: “Write back to Woolf.”

The narrator’s white adviser, Paula, dismisses the idea of shifting her thesis to account for Woolf’s racism; she suggests that the narrator focus on Woolf’s public work rather than her private thoughts. But the narrator feels she must “reckon with [the] mahogany-colored wretch” who has “taken up squatting on a corner of my desk.” She notices that both she and Paula have the same poster of Woolf, but Paula’s, notably, is “framed and under glass.” Where Paula wants to keep her idol’s legacy pristine, the narrator wants to wrestle with Woolf—even if it leaves a mark.

Paula, whom de Kretser refers to as the English Department’s “Designated Feminist,” has a rather low tolerance for complexity: At one point, the narrator learns that she once wrote a scathing pan of a woman’s debut novel, tarring the book as “unfeminist” because its female protagonist despairs over the end of her affair with a man. As it turns out, Paula’s boyfriend had left her for this novelist not long before. When it comes to feminism—and to life itself—the narrator prefers to mine the “messy, human truth” that she sees in her adviser’s book review rather than worship a passed-down pantheon of “flawless feminist heroes.” She wants to make sense of  the gradations and complications of “female experience”—that is, to go beyond theory and account for practice. Indeed, over the course of the novel, most of her learning happens outside the classroom, through encounters and conversations with other people. As fascinating and edifying as theory can be, it can rarely teach us as much about ourselves as everyday life.

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Theory & Practice is sly, spiky, and brilliant: an intellectual coming-of-age story that accounts for all that can’t be learned in the academy—or in books. The novel’s meta structure bears this out: The first few pages belong to what appears to be an entirely different book, ostensibly written and abruptly scrapped by the narrator. The writing has “stalled” because, she says, “I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,” which she finds deceptive in their tidiness. With this observation, the line between author and narrator blurs: Aspects of the book are clearly lifted from de Kretser’s own life—the novel’s Australian cover even bears a picture of a college-aged de Kretser—yet it warns against drawing any neat conclusions. The story that follows flits confidently between modes: memoir and novel, personal and political, fact and fiction. Essayistic asides commingle with tender memories; heady emotions intrude on serious philosophizing. The aim, the narrator says, is to capture a sense of “formlessness and mess”—in other words, real life.

De Kretser’s attraction to chaos and contradiction made sense to me; I myself have struggled to make my disparate thoughts and desires cohere. It was only when I began reading about the formless, messy lives of various feminists in biographies and memoirs—rather than, say, their works of polemic or philosophy—that I no longer felt like a failure. Their mistakes, their resentments, and their embarrassing, often unenlightened feelings were so much like my own. I realized that this painful gap between who one is and who one wishes to be is universal—and no amount of knowledge can assuage it. The narrator feels something similar the first time she sees her own “everyday, unglamorous world” reflected back to her in a film about a young feminist who rages against her ex-boyfriend and his new lover. “What made my heart run like a hare,” she says, “was hearing my mind exposed.” And it’s only through this kind of exposure—of our personal lapses, of the unfairness of love, of the faults of our heroes—that we can get anywhere near the truth.