I have a LOT of FEELINGS about this book. I finished it last night and I miss it already.

Writers & Lovers reads like a delayed-onset coming-of-age story. Casey is 31 and struggling - she's massively in debt, she's recently ended an intense relationship, her mother has just died, she's living in a tiny potting shed owned by her brother's rich asshole friend, and she's been trying to finish her novel for six years.

The story follows her through a series of ups and downs, and some of the downs are seriously down, but it ends on really high note. Which I loved, obvi. I think that because the story followed the reality of life - sometimes you feel really great and great things are happening, only to have it all come crashing down a moment later - it would have been easy to have a bittersweet or imperfect ending. But BECAUSE the book has a lot of ups and downs, the ending doesn't feel contrived or forced - it's a high note, but you know that her life will continue having hard times just like everyone's.

The first 50 pages or so were tough to get through. There were a lot of people and places mentioned and it was hard to keep track of what needed to be remembered and followed and what was just informative backstory. After that, though, the story smoothed out and was a lot easier to follow.

Here are things I loved:
-The way King describes Casey's anxiety and panic attacks had me THERE and FEELING IT
-The parallel drawn between Oscar's observation of his sons' neediness of women since their mother died and his own neediness of women in general/Casey in particular
-Casey's thoughts on men being raised to believe they deserve fame and glory while she's never met a woman who believes the same
-When Casey was hanging out with Silas or Oscar, it was clear that she thought she felt the same for both of them or maybe wanted to feel the same for both of them, but the writing for her actual feelings and reactions to the encounters with each man made it so obvious that she was pushing her real feelings away. I don't understand how King accomplished this - showing us that Casey was ignoring her own feelings while also showing us what those feelings actually were - but it was magnificent
-The whole chess-game-as-metaphor for Casey and Silas
-Casey thinking Silas was pushing her away which in turn made him think she was pushing him away and then he actually pushed away. But then she just TOLD HIM THE TRUTH and we didn't have to deal with all the will they/won't the awkwardness
-The repetitiveness of her restaurant-shift descriptions - gave me the same feeling as MYORAR even though different things happened every day
-Casey overcoming her fears and writing the scene in the book she had been afraid to - changing the setting to the one she feared and suddenly writing it all at once

There's so much more but I think I have to read it again and make notes this time. It's such a smart, empathetic, realistic story. I rooted so hard for Casey, who was dealing with a lot of shit at once and didn't even really realize what she was dealing with but kept pushing forward toward the life she wanted. She feels so real to me, and her friends do too - I feel like I've left my friends behind since I finished the book.

As you would expect from the title, this novel is about the writing and love life of the main character, Casey, a 31 year old waitress in Boston. She struggles with low pay, overwhelming loan debt, doubt regarding the novel she's writing, and grief over the death of her mother. Her waitressing job at a high end Boston restaurant both tires her out and gives her relationships. She meets a fellow aspiring author at a book reading and is almost immediately smitten. Then she meets an author whom she has admired when she serves him and his sons at her restaurant,, and he courts her. As she navigates the two relationships while still trying to get her book recognized, she grapples with what's actually important to her. Having been a waitress, and having lived in Boston without enough money, the narrative and dialog rang absolutely true. Casey is someone I have known and will look forward to meeting some day.

I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of this incredible book from the publisher before it became a Read With Jenna Book Club pick.

Casey Peabody is a 31 year old nomad. She has lived and loved and traveled. Now back in Massachusetts working as a waitress in an upscale restaurant, still in mourning since her mother's untimely death abroad, having just broken up with another boyfriend and not understanding why, debt collectors chasing her about her student loans, and still trying to finish a novel she has been writing forever, she realizes it may be time to grow up.

Living in the decrepit room of a friend of her brother's yard, with a father she knows she has disappointed her whole life, and who has some seedy baggage himself, and a brother who lives states away, Casey begins to experience physical anxiety about her situation.

Then her life becomes complicated. She meets and falls for two men. Both writers, one famous and older, and one young, but with a steady job. But both soon become the inspiration along with her late mother's constant guidance to renew her pursuit to finish her book.

With this new motivation also comes a need to reflect on her past life, both family and social and her need to please everyone but herself. How her lack of confidence in herself came from people she once adored, but she can now see were not healthy for her. Casey needs to become an adult and figure out her life without her mother's loving presence.

The story is thoughtful, serious, yet funny. The writing is smooth and flows. The ending inspiring. All want-to be-writers should put this exceptional novel on their To Be Read list!

Thank you to #NetGalley #GrovePress #LilyKing #Writers&Lovers for the advanced copy.

This book was absolutely outstanding. I haven’t read any Lily King before but I absolutely will be now. The story and characters were incredible and heartbreaking, their struggles both universal and specific to the story. This is one of my favorite reads of this year.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

This is the story of Casey, who is living in a converted potting shed, working as a waitress, struggling with student debt, grieving for her mother, and writing a novel. It is beautifully written and I enjoyed every page of it. Casey was an excellent character - even in her grief and panic attacks she persevered at her job and with her writing - and I enjoyed the passages about her dates with Silas and Oscar. I was afraid it would be one of those novels which ends abruptly with everything up in the air, but the ending was the best bit.

Highly recommended.

I wanted to like this book but I could not get into it. The book was slow and the whole premise seemed silly.

I believe that this book might be best for people that majored in English with vast knowledge of authors who were mentioned throughout the book. I found it very hard book to get into.. I even found it really had a hard time with the first 25% and too keep reading. I couldn't even get into liking the main character or any of her Lovers. I am happy she finally got a little bit of a grip on her life at the end. This book was just a struggle to read from start to finish.

<i>I received a free digital copy in exchange for my honest review.</i>

3.5/5
This one started off pretty slow for me. It was a struggle in the beginning, but I'm glad I stuck it through. The first half felt really drawn out and tedious. But, as I read on, I realized it helped emphasize the monotonous and tiresome life that Casey, the MC, was living. I'm not a writer so I do not know the hardships of a writer's life. However, I think many women can relate to Casey and the listless life she was leading - working at a dead-end waitress job while trying to make progress on the novel she's been writing for 6 years. She wasn't the most lovable character, but she felt authentic. Authentic in that while her life was unremarkable, like many of us, she dealt with complicated and deep emotions that shaped her decisions and life.

All the action happens in the second half of the book and while the ending is a bit predictable, I really enjoyed it because it was exactly what I wanted. I enjoyed Lily King's Euphoria more than this, but still recommend!

Especially as a writer - I loved this book. It's feminist and has a wonderful sense of humor and humanity. It captures so many of the eye-rolling things people say to writers as well as the frustrations and triumphs. I even tweeted this quote because it's so true: "The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking in through the membrane. The second hardest thing is getting out."

Maybe it's my age, or the fact that the world is in the middle a pandemic not seen before in our lifetime, but the story of 31-year old Casey trying to chase her dreams of finishing her first novel while working as a waitress in Harvard Square just didn't resonate with me at all. Particularly now, her angst - which consumed much of the first half of the novel - felt self-indulgent to me. The beautiful writing and the deep descriptive language which portrayed Casey's anxiety in infinite detail should have made me empathetic to her family tragedies, loneliness, lost loves, and career tribulations, but somehow it just didn't work for me. As the somewhat expected ending starts revealing itself towards the end of the book, the story picks up pace and became more engaging.. With all of the advance praise for this novel and the author, I wanted and expected to love this novel but in the end, i was just happy to finish it. Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you Netgalley and Grove Press for an ARC of Writers & Lovers in return for my honest opinion.

I really enjoyed Writers & Lovers! Being in the restaurant industry for my entire career, I really connected with all the restaurant portions of the book. Lily King was spot on with every detail of Casey's workday at Iris. While the storyline does not have a fast pace beginning middle and conclusion I still found the writing style comfortable and all the characters very relatable and interesting.

Casey Peabody and her story stayed with me for several days after I finished the story. This is one of those rare books that after I had time to sit and reflect with the story and characters my rating increased to five stars.

I look forward to reading Lily King's previous books as well as her future publications.

Within the first few sentences of Writers & Lovers, I felt myself being swept away by this story, by the character of Casey, by the desperation in her voice and in her life and the tiny bit of hope that remained within all of it. I didn't think that a book focused so singularly on one character, and ostensibly about her relatively boring, uneventful life, could be this fascinating and this captivating. But it totally fascinated and captivated me.

Casey is a writer, trying to write a novel, while renting a tiny garage apartment in Boston as she waits tables at night and despairs about her ballooning student loan and credit card debt. Her mother died a year ago, she has no relationship with her father (for reasons that become clear as the novel progresses) and her brother lives on the other side of the country. She was blessed with an opportunity to attend a writers retreat over the summer, during which time she fell in love and had her heart broken instead of spending any real time on her novel. In short, her life is a total mess, and at thirty-one years old, she can't quite conceptualize how she managed to get to this age without having the slightest idea of how to get her shit together.

But, as much of a disaster as her life had become, I LOVED Casey. I rooted for her from the first page. Maybe because many of us who read and love novels long to write one ourselves (me included), maybe because I've been in the depths of wondering where I was going to get my next meal or the money to pay my electric bill, maybe it's because I have years of experience waiting tables and that life is SO familiar to me, or maybe it's simply because King's writing is perfection ... for all those reasons, I loved Casey and loved getting immersed in her story. I read this book in two settings, only because I had to interrupt myself to make dinner, and I loved every minute I spent with it.

This was my first novel by Lily King but it will not be my last. Her ability to craft a sympathetic character along with her beautiful writing made this novel really sing. I absolutely loved it.

Casey is a waitress in her 30s, struggling with a recent loss and a book she has been writing for years. I found myself getting more and more interested in Casey as the book progressed.

I also found her incredibly relatable. Some sentences seemed pulled from my own recurring thoughts and feelings, especially a realization that she had at the end.

If you care about star ratings, I’d say there are 5-star scenes and sentences in this book that I ultimately rated 4 stars on Goodreads partly because I kept mixing up the many minor characters. I think it messed with the flow. But this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

It is an excellent character-driven book with great writing and great insight into what it is like being a thirty-something.

This book is beautiful in every way. I found myself so drawn to Casey’s burgeoning introspection and it spurred me to consider my own journey as a writer and woman! Her pain and also joy simmered in the surface and I felt like she was me, or a friend. I will miss her. Is there a better compliment?

What a beautiful and evocative piece of fiction. I've never read anything by Lily King before, but I'm now adding all of her books to my TBR. She writes with such raw emotion, and in a relatable way; parts of this novel felt like I was reading pieces of my own psyche.

In this story we follow Casey, a 31-year-old writer drowning in debt and grief, trying to hold on to her dreams while the rest of her friends seemed to have traded theirs in for more stable “adult” lives. Still shaken by the sudden death of her mother and reeling from a breakup, Casey is just trying to stay afloat and finish her novel when two great men come into the picture.

Typically I don’t enjoy reading about down-on-their-luck protagonists, as I get bored with the “poor me” of it all, but there’s none of that here. Casey is a likable and relatable character — she could be any of us at some point in our lives. It’s written in a way that doesn’t beg you to feel sorry for her, but instead reminds you of the times when you felt what she is feeling.

This book deals a lot with grief, and there’s a paragraph when Casey, the protagonist, wants to call her mom after a first date, forgetting that she’s dead, and it completely wrecked me. King’s writing on losing a mother felt reminiscent of Cheryl Strayed’s in “Wild,” and her pain and longing are equally visceral.

I’ll admit I was worried I wasn't going to be able to finish this book at the beginning. The first ten percent or so felt slow and jumbled, but then something clicked and I found myself getting lost in the prose. I've never highlighted so many lines from a work of fiction before. In an exchange with her estranged father, I was physically anxious and uncomfortable. King’s writing really pulls the reader into the story to feel everything alongside the characters.

I would have liked more time spent on Casey’s eventual journey into therapy. There were only a couple pages dedicated to her sessions, but I thought there was some untapped potential there. It read kind of like a last-minute addition to bolster the ending, and I don’t think anyone would complain about adding a little length to the story. I could have read another hundred pages of Casey’s life without a problem.

“Writers & Lovers” is full of genius — it felt like the emotional outlet I didn’t want to admit I needed right now.

What a tremendous book. Writers & Lovers has been on my radar since the beginning of the year, and it did not disappoint. I started it a couple nights ago and found that I was pacing myself. It was a book I wanted to read in one sitting, but also one that I never wanted to end. Lily King's writing is beautiful. Her words feel purposeful; there is no excess. I loved how as a reader we were able to really get into Casey's mind and feel her anxiety, her confusion, and her ultimate elation. I appreciated the rawness of the story and honesty King portrays throughout the book about navigating life as a young woman. She manages to touch upon so many difficult realities of life from debt to health scares to lost dreams without every seeming like she tried to tackle too much. I found that each piece fit in perfectly with the rest. Although, I am younger than Casey, I found her to be an extremely relatable character. Through her, King is able to illustrate what growing up as a woman means and what it means to be an artist. I have found a new favorite book, and I look forward to rereading this one time after time. It is definitely a story that, I believe, will resonate with me for many years to come.

Overall an enjoyable read, although the beginning was a bit of a slow burn, and toward the end the narrative arc seemed like wish fulfillment (although perhaps based on the author's real life?). King perfectly captured that failure-to-launch frustration, writer's edition, so that it felt truly palpable. And all of the passages dealing with Casey's grief over her mother's death were painfully familiar to anyone who's been through it.

Many thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the ARC.

Here's the thing: if I could give this books a hundred thousand stars I would.

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.

I have not enjoyed a book as much as I enjoyed this one in a very, very long time. Casey is simply a phenomenal character. Some of her struggles I could relate to; some others - like the loss of her mother - are entirely foreign to me, but depicted in such an honest, raw, and authentic way, that they broke my heart nonetheless.

The book's greatest strength, in my opinion, is how real it felt. King managed to really capture the little moments of everyday life that make life both unique and bearable; the conversations with your co-workers that make you feel like someone has your back, the simple gestures that make you realize that someone's there for you, that someone's been there for you all along.

The book's second greatest asset, second only to its honesty, is its unique way of looking at certain things. I don't want to spoil too much, but the way Oscar talks about his wife's death and how it has affected its children is one I have never seen before. Or the way Casey describes European art, and how "a whole continent (was) possessed by one story for centuries"; King just manages to express Casey's thoughts, emotions, and state of mind in a truly unique, distinctive way.

I suppose what really made this book special for me is that, for the first time in a while, the protagonist and the people around her expressed thoughts and emotions in ways I hadn't seen before. Writers & Lovers is not just a very refreshing work of literature, but, at least for me, a wonderful, thought-provoking read. This is exactly the type of book I thought Normal People was going to be. While Normal People did not live up to my expectations, this book is as intriguing and inspiring as you've heard. I genuinely cannot recommend it enough.

3.75 stars

Casey is in her early 30s living in Boston. Her mother has just died. She works as a waitress and is an aspiring novelist. Grief and all of her other problems make day to day life feel challenging and uncertain. Ok, this one took me a lot of time to read. I had trouble focusing on Casey's problems while in the middle of a world pandemic. But by the end, I was thankful to Lily King for the taste of normal life and normal problems. King is a good writer. She zeroes in a narrow situation and gets you right into her character's headspace. Writers & Lovers was strongest toward the end, but it was still worth reading despite (and given) our current situation.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me access to an advance copy.

One wonders if a more appropriate title would have been ‘Waiter, Writers and Lovers.’ For much of the first part of the novel, Casey Peabody is a waitress at Iris, a fairly upmarket restaurant. At this stage, she is probably at her lowest point of her life: She has no boyfriend, her mother whom she loves has suddenly died while she was on vacation, she has an outstanding debt of huge college loans which she is unable to settle and she works in a hostile environment. Though she is writing a novel, she seems to be suffering from a writer’s block. She is living in Boston, in rather squalid conditions in room which used to be a potting shed and, to reduce her rent, she walks her landlord’s dog. The only virtue she seems to possess is a persistence to continue writing her novel, in the face of immense obstacles when most of her friends have given up the thought of making their careers in writing and have taken the easy way out.
King spends a lot of time and effort describing Casey’s work as a waiter, serving well-heeled customers who are celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Her colleagues and her bosses are realistically portrayed, politics and favouritism dominating the scenario but in unnecessary detail which tends to slows down the pace of the book.

Casey suddenly finds herself faced with not one but two lovers: Oscar is a rich, middle aged successful writer, a widower with two sons and Silas, a struggling writer, closer to her age, to whom she is definitely more sexually attracted but who is not very reliable who seems to be playing hot and cold. She is faced with a choice between ‘fireworks’ on one hand and ‘coffee in beds on the other. It is here that the novel really picks up. King manages to make the choice evenly balanced and her skill as a novelist comes to the forefront. The language is beautiful and the characters are effectively portrayed in a concise manner.

There are perceptive and amusing feminist remarks. All boys are brought up to believe that they are destined for great things; though some women may be ambitious and self-driven, no woman says that ‘greatness was her destiny.’

Once the book picks up it is a great read. It’s only the first third of the book which may discourage a reader if he/she is not persistent.