![]() Two years after that, in Los Angeles, divorced, the narrator is armed with another story to explain her behavior to herself: “that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others.” The first sections of the novel are incisive, often biting, but mannered, as though the narrator’s own oppressive self-consciousness has rubbed off on the prose. This is the underlying premise of their relationship, that they are both bad people or at least, that is the story they tell themselves and so the story that unites them. Ten years later, at an art exhibit in San Francisco-the work is by a Swedish video artist whose subject is “female pain”-our narrator and a friend discuss heartbreak with detached cruelty. This is the question that propels the novel it is a book of ideas-about power and gender, about desire, about loneliness and rage-but it is also, at its core, a novel about storytelling, about the quest for a stable narrative that can explain us to others and to ourselves. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives,” she recalls. “I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. ![]() But what captivates our narrator is the woman’s certainty, her belief in her own story. One night, the mother, an Argentinian psychoanalyst, recounts her own romantic history, a lesson in the gendered dynamics of power. Our narrator, a grad student in English, is spending August on vacation with a more glamorous friend’s family, earning her keep minding their 7-year-old twins. An unnamed narrator navigates female identity-her own and in general-through a series of conversations that span the course of 20 years in Popkey’s painfully sharp debut.
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