Better by Far: A Novel - Softcover

Hayes, Hazel

 
9780593472958: Better by Far: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593472950 ISBN 13: 9780593472958
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

One of Zibby Mag's Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in 2024 | One of SheNet's Highly Anticipated Books of 2024

A genre-bending story about love and loss, hope and heartbreak, and the healing to be found in life’s little limbos, those in-between spaces where you’re no longer who you were and not yet the person you will be
 
About her debut, Out of Love, Hazel Hayes said, “The journey from writing horror to writing love stories was a short one. There is nothing more horrific than love.” In her new novel, she sets out to prove it.
 
This genre-defying, meta-modern novel is unlike anything you have ever read, and yet at its core it is a story we all deeply understand. A story of love and liminality, and the ways in which grief grips us all. Prepare to laugh and cry; Hazel Hayes will break your heart, but then she’ll mend it for you.
 
Following a breakup, Kate and Finn decide to keep sharing their house until the lease runs out in twelve weeks’ time, alternating week by week so that they are occupying the same space but never at the same time.
 
Practically, the plan makes sense, but coming back each Sunday to a home where Finn has been and gone feels far too much like living with a ghost. Kate lost her mother at a young age and now this fresh grief dredges unhealed sorrows up to the surface, and soon, Kate finds herself adrift in her own subconscious, trapped in the liminal space between loving someone and letting go.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hazel Hayes is an Irish-born, London-based writer and director who for many years wrote primarily for the screen. After graduating from Dublin City University with a degree in journalism, she went on to study creative writing at the Irish Writers Centre, before honing her craft as a screenwriter through numerous short films and sketches. Her eight-part horror, PrankMe, won series of the year at Social in the City, as well as the award for excellence in storytelling at Buffer Festival in Toronto. Out of Love was her first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Till February

I'm supposed to be writing a book, but instead I find myself writing to you. I prepare the blank page, ready to pour myself onto it, but all that comes out is your absence, which feels so much more like a presence. How odd that the language of grief is one of loss-people describe feeling empty, hollow, carved out-when for me, grief is heavy. There's a weight to it. A density.

In Irish we don't say I am sad; we say tá brón orm-there is sadness on me. And we don't say someone is grieving, we say they are faoi mhéala-under grief. The phrase "going into mourning" literally translates as "putting on a robe of sorrow." We wear our feelings, wrapping them around ourselves like cloaks that separate us from the world, and grief is the heaviest one of all.

Today, unsatisfied with simply weighing me down, grief finds a way to slip inside me, filling me up like some tar-like creature that clogs my throat and lungs and crams itself into the cavities between my organs. You've only been gone a few hours and already I am turgid with the lack of you.


I say you’re gone, but you’re not really. Not yet. Your clothes are still hanging in the wardrobe. Your CDs are stacked, alphabetically, on the shelf above the stereo. Your squash racket is over there by the door-you said you wouldn’t need it this week. You even left your passport here, in the top drawer of your bedside table; it occurred to me just moments ago to check if it was there, and I must admit my relief in finding it. Not that it matters where you are, I suppose, if we won’t be seeing each other anyway; it’s just easier knowing you’re stuck here too-in drizzly, dark Dublin, where places carry with them reminders of me-and not sitting at a table by some quaint town square, in Paris perhaps, or maybe Croatia. Yeah, that feels right-Croatia. With its mild evenings, cobbled streets, and local beer on tap. Local women too-all of them perfect, in your eyes, because you don’t know them yet, haven’t fought with them yet, haven’t seen them sick or sad or suicidal.

Perched on the edge of our bed, with your passport in my hands, I picture one of these women approaching you with an easy smile, all-over tan, and oodles of sympathy for the brokenhearted boy reading a book outside her favourite café. I let myself linger on the scene for far too long, right up to the point where you wake up face down, ass out, legs tangled in her ridiculously white sheets. The whole scene, in fact, is impossibly white, bright to the point of overexposure. She opens her eyes, stretches her long limbs. One corner of her mouth curls up. "Good morning," she purrs.

Stop it, I tell myself, flinging your passport back in the drawer. He isn't in Croatia. He's in his brother's filthy flat in Lucan.

Unfortunately, knowing a story isn't real doesn't make the feelings it evokes any less real. And so I'm left with all the jealousy and rage churned up by my own pathetic work of fiction.

Why can't I write an actual work of fiction?

A real writer would spin this breakup into gold. A real writer would chew it up and spit out a novel so magnificent it would make all the heartbreak worthwhile. Cure it, even. A real writer would sell a million copies and buy herself a mansion paid for with pain.

I mentally fast-forward to this imaginary point in my future, when I stand at the summit of my dreams and look back down at the jagged path I climbed to get there. It's so clear that I can almost taste how thin the air is. But then I remember I'm still at the bottom of the mountain, just a sad little Sisyphus with a book to write and a heart to mend, and today, both tasks seem equally insurmountable.

My shoulders slump forward, like my skeleton has suddenly vanished, leaving the vague shape of a human behind. I slide, sluglike, onto your side of the bed and instantly begin to cry. It's not a particularly loud or deliberate cry-my face doesn't contort or change-I just stare at the wall as tears flow involuntarily down my face, like blood pouring from a wound. I hate these walls. These bare, eggshell walls. I hate the potential I saw in them.


Your mother calls at two o’clock. I peel my face off the soggy pillow and pick up, half expecting an onslaught of concern over our breakup, maybe even a plea for me to call you, to make up, to make it work. Instead, she asks if we’ve made plans for Christmas yet.

She doesn't know.

And I'm certainly not going to tell her.

I say we'll get back to her and I hang up as fast as I can. Then I think about Christmas without you, and I resume crying. Hours pass. But when I check the clock again it's only eight minutes past two.


I am all too familiar with this feeling of time distended; when my mother died, time ceased to behave as it had before. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was nine years old and idling in a geography class when it happened. She drowned in a freak current just off Colligeen Beach, not far from our home. At her wake I heard someone say one of her lungs had ruptured. Though I didn’t know what “ruptured” meant then, I looked it up later in my father’s dusty blue thesaurus, scraping one glittery pink fingernail down the list of increasingly upsetting words.

Crack. Fracture. Split. Breach. Burst.

Strangely, there was no word in that book, nor have I found one since, that conveyed how I felt that day, the day her body lay shrouded in our dining room. "Grief" doesn't even come close-its paltry five letters no less crude a symbol of the thing they are supposed to represent than a stick-figure drawing of a person; they lack all the nuance, magnitude, and magic of the real thing.

As a sign of respect, all four clocks in the house were stopped for her. Even the imposing grandfather clock in the hallway stood idle, its pendulum hanging limp as a broken limb. But time didn't stop with them. It didn't even have the courtesy to slow down, though I was positive it had. Time, unticking, ticked on. The clocks caught up. And so, too, did the calendar in the kitchen, which was dutifully flipped at the dawn of each new month. Counting ever further away from her.

My mother's death was like a puncture in the fabric of my existence, beginning as a pinprick and expanding outwards to become a gaping black hole around which every other moment seemed to catch and drag. Minutes, hours, days, all spiralled inexorably inwards, endlessly elongated by the brutal pull of that tiny, terrifying iris, that ineluctable instant, from which no light or life could possibly escape. My mother was in there, I was sure of it, beyond the event horizon, alive, preserved, pristine, just as she had been, but neither one of us could cross it; she couldn't exist after that point, and I could never return to a time before it. Nor could I move forward, it seemed, to the day it didn't hurt anymore, when time resumed moving at a regular pace. I was trapped in the space between grief and healing, no longer the person I was, not yet the person I would be, with no choice but to endure it.

Now here I am again. Trapped. Waiting. Enduring.

Scientists call it spaghettification, the stretching out of matter towards a singularity. That's how life felt. Spaghettified. Each new feeling was eternal while it lasted. Each new experience unnaturally prolonged. Even memories grew misshapen in that place, malformed by the gravity of my loss. Sometimes, still, the days and dates surrounding her death are indistinguishable. My father shows me photographs from that year and I feign recognition as he smiles down at some grainy six-by-four scene. All I see are spectres of myself: roller-skating down my street, blowing out ten candles, holding up a small glass trophy-I'm told I won a local spelling...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593472950
ISBN 13 
9780593472958
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Dutton
https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/

Im Mittelfeld 25
K?ln
Deutschland
51105
Deutschland