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(4.17) | 60 | #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today Emma Roberts' Belletrist Book Club Pick A New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.… (more) |
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For my sister, Lisa,
with love and gratitude  | |
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I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. | |
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I don't write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse. It's a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone. Marriage is the polar opposite of a fairy tale, my mother said. When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, 'Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.'
And now she's dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand. He's still leaning against his car and turning only his head in my direction, as if he likes his pose too much to undo it. I don't know if they're friends outside of the building, but they work every shift together like a pair of evil skaters, setting each other up for another dastardly deed, then preening around the room when it comes off. And yet now I can't remember what we said to each other. Conversations in foreign languages don't linger in my head like they do in English. They don't last. They remind me of the invisible-ink pen my mother sent me for Christmas when I was fifteen and she had gone, an irony that escaped her but not me. In the morning I ache for my mother. But late at night it is Luke I mourn for. He kissed me where I was touching, just below my collarbone, in that place where all my feelings got caught. I feel like a hag in a fairy tale, waiting to be made young and supple again. All your life there will be men like this, I think. It sounds a lot like my mother's voice. I wheel it around to his window and ring my bell out of habit. It is the sound of me coming to his cabin at the end of the day. I want to take that sound and stuff it into a bag with rocks and throw it into the river. I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. He seems genuinely happy for me. You can't always count on a guy for that. The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. I feel like there's a misshapen ball in my lungs that isn't leaving much room for air. He can sound wise in love, but he's bad at it, too. We pass beneath a maple that has already started to drop leaves. They crack beneath our feet and lease the smell of fall. I take his hand and he pulls me in and kisses me on the temple and we look through the windows again as if the house and everything inside it belongs to both of us. You don't realize how much effort you've put into covering things up until you try to dig them out. It always takes me by surprise when someone wants to kiss me, even if they've met me at midnight with wine and a blanket. People change their mind. Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow. We hold hands on the way back, but it feels like we're still kissing. My whole body responds to his hand in mine. Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision. Small unexpected things begin to thrum across the whole book. I feel like a conductor, finally able to hear all the instruments at once. I take a breath, and it becomes so deep I realize I haven't taken one for a while. It has been a long time since I've seen them. Three years, maybe. They look older, like something is gently tugging them to the floor. There seems no end to the procession of things that make my mother feel more dead. Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher's prophesy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny. Being around kids means thinking a whole lot of things you can't say. He's very tall and very thin, a knife blade of intensity. Afterward I ask them to write about a time they felt like that. They open their notebooks slowly. They're wary, like when you try to feed a squirrel. I float like a balloon back to the classroom. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today Emma Roberts' Belletrist Book Club Pick A New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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31-year-old Casey Peabody, narrator of Writers & Lovers, is on an emotional rollercoaster. She's between her dreams and their realization as she doggedly pursues her desires - success as a writer, love, and family. She endures losses - her mother, her job, her apartment - and disappointments - men, men, and men. Lily doesn't write about the "what" so much as she writes about how it felt. I went along for the ride, and it was worth it for its emotional intelligence.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Stacey Glemboski, borrowed from the library using hoopla.
Around the year in 52 books challenge notes:
#48. A book published in 2020 (