Or they seem to want someone else to make things happen for them. MCAMMON: I'm struck by the fact that there are so many women in this book, including the narrator herself, who often don't seem to know exactly what they want. And something I find sort of frightening - that the fact that it's just - that that's in my brain. But certainly, I have the sense that it was possible that the men around me knew my own desire better than I did. And it's certainly in this moment, you know, post #MeToo where we are re-evaluating some of those themes that, as you say, just pervade our discussions about female sexuality. I think that's such a - I mean, that's such a big theme throughout the book - is sort of these negotiations around power and consent and desire and the tensions that, I think, a lot of women feel. What I saw was a man sort of forcing himself on a woman and the woman realizing, ah, yes, this is, in fact, what I desire. When you see the same sort of thing over and over again, I think it's possible that you come to want that thing in your own life. And Adrian is trying to get out of the apartment. And there's a knife in it for some reason. There's a mattress against the wall - vertically. MIRANDA POPKEY: A moment I thought a lot about as I was writing this novel is a moment in the movie "Rocky." There's a moment when Rocky has taken Adrian out on a date, and they're back at his apartment. So it's fitting her book is called "Topics Of Conversation." Miranda Popkey says she was thinking about the kinds of messages women often absorb about how to think about those topics. Popkey's story follows an unnamed woman over 17 years as she opens up about topics like love and infidelity, desire and power. Fisher’s last novel, “F*ck Marriage,” was a self-published romance.In her debut novel, Miranda Popkey explores the kinds of raw and vulnerable conversations that happen between women in private - conversations over a cup of coffee, a bottle of wine or on a long car ride, discussions we don't always know how to start that sometimes take an unexpected turn. To put this in perspective, Atwood two months earlier had been named the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. In its first week of publication, the first week of 2020, Tarryn Fisher’s “The Wives” knocked Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” from the top spot on the bestselling fiction list, and it’s still there. The former is worth reading in itself, as interesting a sweep through popular culture as you will find, referencing books, TV, film web series, artworks, songs, newsletters, podcasts and more. Perhaps to underline that fact of fiction, Popkey concludes with a lengthy list of Works (Not) Cited in the commission of her novel, in addition to a much shorter list of Works Cited. We do like her, though she is not always a good person, and knows it.Ī final word: “Topics of Conversation” has been described as autofiction though maybe that’s true only to the extent that all acts of literature are drawn from an author’s experience. Tease out enough rope and the listener, she’ll hang on your every word.” We do hang on her every word. She admits to this: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: conversation is flirtation. And gradually you, the reader, realize that you are complicit in her project, that Popkey wants to be liked, and to be likable she must seduce. Popkey’s genius is in reproducing her narrator’s dual experience, participating in a dialogue while processing what is being said to her, thus interior and exterior, with all the attendant tangents, riffs, backtracks and corrections. And that unwrapping, that denuding, is always, inevitably sensual.” Here’s Popkey explaining how eroticism animates a conversation: “This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden. It ends in 2017 in California, with her living in the San Joaquin Valley and working in Fresno, wiser, even hopeful.Įach of these 10 conversations - with other women, with a stranger in the bar and later a hotel room, with her mother, even listening to a recording of a woman who was at the party where Norman Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele, and more - are intense, intimate and, unexpectedly, sexual. It begins in 2000 when the unnamed narrator is 21 (“daffy with sensation, drunk with it”), working in Otranto, the tip of Italy’s heel, a summer job minding the children of Argentinian psychoanalysts. What a strange title, more like a label or a subhead, and yet how fitting, because each of the 10 chapters in Miranda Popkey’s singular approach to novel writing is a conversation. They’re creating a lot of buzz - but are the books everyone’s talking about (and buying) worth your reading time and money?
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