Topics of Conversation

A really sharp, poignant novel that spans over fifteen years and emphasize on the unnamed narrator's examination of her life through her or other people's stories. Brutally honest, gripping and fun read.

A debut novel tightly wound around the narratives that women weave to make sense of their lives. The book follows conversations that the unnamed narrator has with other women - on the feminist guilt in enjoying rough sex and male dominance; on Freudian trajectories used to justify inaction; on the many subtle ways in which women indicate marital dissatisfaction. The narrator speaks intimately both with women who tell crass, ugly stories and with women who craft beautiful, romantic ones and there is an excitement in this divulging - ‘There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current.‘ Despite its loose structure, character growth is apparent over the course of the novel. The narrator matures out of narratives to a woman who in motherhood realises that ‘my life, like the lives of most people, lacks an origin story. I mean one with any explanatory power. Which means that my son could turn out any way and for any reason or for no reason at all. I’m not sure if it’s irony but here it is, at last I’ve found the thing I do want to control, and of course I can’t.’ The book is sometimes difficult to read because its stream of consciousness style has a tenuous relationship with punctuation, but I found it insightful and impressive nonetheless.

Topics of Conversation is a tense read, seething with a sustained and brutal honesty throughout. The whole text felt very cleverly infused with an underlying sense of dread, like disaster was only a few pages away at any time. It takes a while to get used to the cadence of the book; Popkey’s tone throughout is truly conversational, pausing for the interjections, observations, and gesticulation that we would encounter during real life conversations, all framed in a series of vignettes ranging from a conversation with her mother about her sex life to an interview with a friend of Norman Mailer’s. A stunning debut, perfect for fans of literary fiction.

I can see this being one of the big reads of 2020 - Miranda Popkey's novel stands up on its own merits, but for purposes of comparison I'd agree with the Goodreads blurb which recommends it for readers of Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill, though at times I was reminded of the clarity in Sally Rooney's writing as well.

The story follows an unnamed woman over the course of 15 years through the various conversations she has with different women she encounters - much like Cusk's Outline trilogy, these conversations range widely in content but each of them brings the reader somewhere closer to understanding the nature of humans and one's self, relationships, motherhood, shame and desire, and what it means to be a woman dealing with each of these things. I think the blurb sums things up pretty well: "What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us?". Recommended!