Calamities is a philosophical and thought-provoking collection of essays, about various aspects of Gladman's life. Each essay begins on a different day, and each day brings about a new thought or idea to explore. Gladman positions essays about her career working at a university alongside essays about her personal life, offering a full picture of her experience.
This collection of essays has some incredible imagery and metaphors, leading some to call her essays prose poetry. For example, when writing about what she calls "the university level," she imagines this metaphorical space having "a series of gates to pass through, a grand lawn, a series of gates and then an elevator to take you down into the earth." In a particularly poignant passage, Gladman describes the presence of past relationships in one's life, using architectural imagery. She describes how her partner Danielle "missed this decade where we just couldn't burn our bridges, where we built bridges on top of ruined bridges and lived in an elaborate architecture of trying."
