Topics of Conversation
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2.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
'If you're a fan of Sally Rooney's work, then you can't go wrong by picking up a copy of Topics Of Conversation ... She's a fresh voice, and one that it's certainly worth listening to.' Vogue
'Miranda Popkey's debut explores the paradox of longing to assert control and longing to lose it ... She depicts what it feels like to exist, actually live, at that intersection, which can so often bring about paralysis.' New Yorker
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?
From 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. 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. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The women in Popkey's astute debut bristle with wanting. Readers meet the unnamed narrator in Italy, "twenty-one and daffy with sensation," where she is working as a nanny for a well-off friend's younger brothers while her friend leaves her behind in favor of Greek tourists she's met on the beach. In her third week, she has a late-night conversation with her friend's mother, Artemisia, an Argentinean psychoanalyst, about their paralleled romantic histories with much older men, both their former professors. These conversations about power, responsibility, and desire, often as they manifest in relationships with men, provide the backbone for the subsequent sections of the novel, which follow the narrator through breakups with friends, with lovers, and motherhood. As the years progress, the narrator's hyperawareness and cheeky playfulness when it comes to her narrative as something she owns, grows as well. At a new moms meetup in Fresno 14 years after that night in Italy, the narrator asks the rest of the moms to share "how we got here." The story she herself shares is an echo of the one she told Artemisia, but better, the details burnished and editorialized. Popkey's prose is overly controlled, but this is nonetheless a searing and cleverly constructed novel and a fine indication of what's to come from this promising author.
