![]() With the skill of a true storyteller, Popkey draws us into these series of tales/conversations with an intimacy normally reserved for the true voyeur - less a privileged guest of the author and more spy in the camp of another woman's subjectivity - her deepest darkest feelings laid bare to me, a stranger. Unlike Evaristo's novel, which is comprised of a series of interlinked tales of different women, Popkey focuses her story on a sole female narrator recounting her conversations with other women over a period of 20 years. Like Evaristo's tour de force of a novel, Popkey explores with an eye to the beauty and complexities of female subjectivity, the rich tapestry of womanhood. Having just finished "Girl, Woman, Other" by this year's Booker Prize Winner, Bernardine Evaristo, I was delighted to come across Miranda Pokey's, "Topics of Conversation". Thanks to NetGalley and Serpent's Tail/Profile Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.Ī beautifully poignant ode to the rich tapestry of womanhood. I’m not sure if it’s irony but here it is, at last I’ve found the thing I do want to control, and of course I can’t.’ The book is sometimes difficult to read because its stream of consciousness style has a tenuous relationship with punctuation, but I found it insightful and impressive nonetheless. Which means that my son could turn out any way and for any reason or for no reason at all. The narrator matures out of narratives to a woman who in motherhood realises that ‘my life, like the lives of most people, lacks an origin story. The narrator speaks intimately both with women who tell crass, ugly stories and with women who craft beautiful, romantic ones and there is an excitement in this divulging - ‘There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current.‘ Despite its loose structure, character growth is apparent over the course of the novel. The book follows conversations that the unnamed narrator has with other women - on the feminist guilt in enjoying rough sex and male dominance on Freudian trajectories used to justify inaction on the many subtle ways in which women indicate marital dissatisfaction. of SpeculationĪ debut novel tightly wound around the narratives that women weave to make sense of their lives. Popkey writes about these emotional eddies with such thrilling detachment you'll wonder why you ever worried about love at all.' Jenny Offill, author of Dept. 'A pleasingly unsentimental novel about attraction and repulsion and the fluid line between the two. ![]() Sizzling with enigmatic desire, Miranda Popkey's debut novel is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers. The novel unfurls through a series of conversations - in private with friends, late at night at parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, cynicism, envy and intimacy. ![]() What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us?įrom the coast of the Adriatic to the salt spray of Santa Barbara, the narrator of Topics of Conversation maps out her life through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation. ![]()
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