Still, it can be hard to comprehend the things she rails against: a husband who is beyond understanding, parents who financially support her, and especially her son, who has done nothing wrong. She’s not hiding or sweetening her mistakes (cheating on her husband, getting drunk and leaving her son in the care of a sitter for far too long) she’s not building up to a redemption story. She makes bad decision after bad decision, painting herself largely as unlikable, which is refreshing in its own way. The narrator hadn’t yet understood what Joan Didion put so succinctly: We tell ourselves stories in order to live.įor much of the rest of the compact, yet somewhat tedious book, the stories the narrator tells are excruciating. The story sticks with the narrator, who recalls it some twenty years later, not because of its content, but because in it, Artemisia had constructed a narrative that perfectly fit her idea of herself. She fixates on her classmate’s mother, Artemisia, a stylish and accomplished woman who one night reveals the details about the disintegration of her relationship with her first husband. We meet the narrator when she is twenty-one, a graduate student studying English, on vacation in Italy with a classmate, serving as a nanny to the family’s twin boys. Popkey is interested in teasing out the ways (mostly heterosexual) women are conditioned to experience, or shy away from, desire, power and intimacy-an interesting exercise to be sure, though many of the stories follow a narrow line of powerlessness. Most take the form of conversations she has with other women: strangers, friends, her mother, and revolve, at least tangentially, around men.
#MIRANDA POPKEY SERIES#
Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, “Topics of Conversation,” weaves a series of narratives over the course of the unnamed protagonist’s post-college life.
0 kommentar(er)
