Topics of Conversation: A novel - Hardcover

Popkey, Miranda

 
9780525656289: Topics of Conversation: A novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525656286 ISBN 13: 9780525656289
Verlag: Knopf, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction, perfect for fans of Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill.

“Shrewd and sensual, Popkey's debut carries the scintillating charge of a long-overdue girls' night." —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
A Best Book of the Year by TIME, Esquire, Real Simple, Marie Claire, Glamor, Bustle, and more
 
Composed almost exclusively of conversations between women—the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves—Topics of Conversation careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. In exchanges about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage, Popkey touches upon desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, and guilt. Edgy, wry, and written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism, this novel introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MIRANDA POPKEY lives in Massachusetts. Topics of Conversation is her first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 2



Ann Arbor, 2002
 
“There’s this girl I know.” She took a drag of her cigarette, exhaled. We were in her apartment, large but the space poorly apportioned, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and then a kitchen jutting off a wide central hallway that served also as the living room, its floor hardwood, dark and scuffed; earlier that night I’d ripped a hole in my stockings, snagged the soft fabric on a splinter. I was sitting on the floor. We were graduate students in the Midwest and our stipends had rented us more space than we knew what to do with. John had been at the party but he had left and it was only women now, four of us: me (female pain in Jacobean revenge tragedies); the apartment’s tenant (American literature since 1981); Laura (the Bloomsbury group, with a focus on Virginia Woolf); and a blonde with heavy eyelids, those eyelids now closed because she was, her head resting against the wall, asleep (female narratives of the Civil War). Because Laura and the tenant were on chairs and I was on the floor and the other woman on the floor was asleep, I felt myself an acolyte or a novice, felt Laura and the tenant to be my teachers. Mostly the tenant. I craned my neck. The tenant was speaking.

“This girl I know. Knew. We went to undergrad together. We weren’t close, but I’d see her around. Not at parties, but in class, or she’d host— she called them soirées: cheese and crackers and flaky puff pas-tries stuffed with meat— and I’d be invited. We had coffee, lunch, a handful of times. Nice girl. Mousy, shy. Had braces her freshman and sophomore years. Pretty. But unpolished. Hair always back in a pony-tail. Overalls. Actual overalls. Like the nerdy girl before the makeover, the makeover that is destined to be, that is a priori successful, because the girl, of course, she was always hot, she was just”— she waved the hand holding the cigarette— “wearing weird glasses or whatever.” She stubbed the cigarette out. “Anyway, her junior year, this was after the braces came off, she started dating this guy. She was— ” The tenant stood and walked into the kitchen to refill her drink. Behind me was a coffee table littered with discarded cups, plastic, most of them, a handful filled with cigarette ash, lipstick- smeared butts. The tenant was standing now, leaning against one edge of the arched threshold that divided the kitchen from the hallway– living room. “She was,” the ten-ant said, “a virgin. I don’t know how I knew this— I don’t think she told me— but I’m sure I knew it and I’m sure it was true. We were part of the same larger circle. All of us English majors.” She smiled. “One semester a whole bunch of us took Chaucer and we would spend our weekends getting drunk and memorizing bits of The Canterbury Tales. We had a game going where the thing was to sneak the word queynte into conversations with anyone who hadn’t done their pre–eighteen hundreds pre-reqs.” She shrugged. “I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I say I’m sure, when I say it was known. Not that we gossiped about it. We were twenty, twenty- one, and I mean we memorized Chaucer for fun, it wasn’t so unusual. Just, it was known.” The tenant lit another cigarette. Laura and I were still sitting. Laura was worrying a cuticle on a finger of her left hand with the thumb of her right, as was her habit when she was no longer and could not foresee when she would again be the center of attention. The blonde made a small noise somewhere between a sneeze and a snore and rolled her head so that it drooped now over her left rather than her right shoulder. “But anyway this guy. He was— we wouldn’t have known to call him a predator then. A sexual predator. Even now, saying the words, I feel kind of”— she shrugged again— “kind of stupid. But he was a grad student and my first year he dated a freshman and then later she dropped out and my second year he dated another freshman and she went on medical leave and in between there were”— she waved the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette— “rumors. That he could be a little— rough. That he didn’t care if the girl wasn’t into it. That the pretty girls in his section got the best grades. I remember hearing once that he had a wife stashed away somewhere, but that one I never—  Anyway. The point is, my third year, our junior year, this girl, she starts dating this grad student. And the fact that he was dating a junior, this actually seemed like an improvement. She was twenty- one and he was thirty- one, maybe thirty- two, and we, I feel bad about this now, we joked that maybe this was exactly what she needed, like he was the hot guy in the movie about the pretty nerd, how she wouldn’t be a virgin much longer. I want to say— I want to offer as exculpatory evidence, our fear. I want to say that our jokes were born of our relief that he’d picked her and not one of us, and I do think that was part of it, but also—  she was so prissy, she didn’t drink, didn’t go to par-ties, turned all her papers in on time. I think we resented her for being— apparently, of course, not like we knew— untouched by college, unmarred. By this point, this was several semesters post- Chaucer, we’d all humiliated ourselves in one way or another, gotten too drunk and vomited in the bushes or yelled at an ex in the backyard of a frat house or woken up in someone’s bed and not been able to remember how we got there— but this girl; this girl, she hadn’t— not once. We resented her for it. And then also why hadn’t he picked us, that was the other side of it, weren’t we good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. By what criteria had we been judged, in which ways had we been found wanting.

“Anyway. We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting herself into. We told ourselves she was an adult, and sure the rumors were wide-spread, sure they were widely believed, but they were also just that, rumors. The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn- positive, we were sex- positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminists. Who were we to judge.” The ten-ant walked over to the chair she’d been sitting in and began to lower herself, changed her mind, stood back up. “At first,” she said, “at first they seemed happy. He started going out a little bit less and she started going out a little bit more. Once a month, twice a month, we’d see them at a party together— she’d always be wearing something ridiculous. Once, this was in March or April, nowhere near Halloween, she came in a kind of— classy cowgirl costume, patterned dress, lace trim, hat and boots and a rib-bon around her neck.” She shook her head. “But so anyway they’d show up, arm in arm, and she’d be wearing something ridiculous and she still wouldn’t drink, just sit on the couch and sip from a cup of tonic water all night while he took shots with former students. Now I tell my undergrads, told my under-grads, If a grad student wants to hang out with you, that’s a sign, a sign you should definitely not hang out with them, but back then”— she shook her head— “it didn’t occur to us, how inappropriate it was, this guy at parties with people a decade younger than he was, people whose grades he had recently been, in some cases still was, responsible for. We thought it meant we were— mature, sophisticated, I don’t know, adult.” She lit a fresh cigarette off...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525656286
ISBN 13 
9780525656289
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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