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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.
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the cover
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...
Reviews-
November 25, 2019 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.
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