![]() ![]() That’s the narrator thinking of her former professor. ![]() I thought of how the games we had played, me taking dictation from him while – how they had emphasised not my maturity but my inferiority. And now I thought of my former professor. Perhaps you, Artemisia said, you, too, have wished for this. He had shown me to be older than my years, which is often what young people, what young women in particular, wish for. He had shown me to be intelligent, worldly, mature. Artemisia tells this story in the manner of a character from Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy: through the narrator’s memory, and without quotation marks to create clean boundaries between her speech and the narrator’s thoughts: She had become involved with a professor while at university in Buenos Aires, then moved with him to New York, where the balance of power in their relationship shifted because her English was better than his, she reports, ‘He needed my help.’ Once dependent on her, he grew bitter and jealous, even violent. Camila’s parents cover the narrator’s expenses in exchange for her acting as nanny to Camila’s rowdy twin brothers.Īrtemisia, the mother, is beautiful and glamorous, and the narrator admires her for this as well as for her self-understanding: ‘She knew herself so well and I, at twenty-one, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life.’ One night, after the boys are in bed, Artemisia joins her on the balcony with a bottle of white wine and monologues at her a story about her failed first marriage. The novel begins in the year 2000, in coastal Italy, where she has gone on vacation with a wealthy college friend, Camila, and Camila’s family. ![]() Each conversation is given its own chapter, labeled with the setting and the year it took place, and each represents a defining point in the storyline of the unnamed narrator’s adult life – in the formation of her identity, or at least her self-image. It’s a novel told in ten conversations over seventeen years. Miranda Popkey’s debut, Topics of Conversation, is almost a novelisation of the Didion quote, with all its intended implications of corruption and compromise: the dirty side of narrativisation. The word ‘stories’ has a mushy, nostalgic feel, as in, ‘Tell me a story, Daddy.’ What she means, though, is lies – or if not lies, manipulations: ‘We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’ The phantasmagoria of ‘images’ is reality – the narrative of language is the lie. With Didion’s line – the opening sentence of The White Album – you need the full paragraph to understand that it’s contemptuous. But when you read the whole poem, it’s clear that it’s ironic – a joke about self-deception. Another is ‘I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ In isolation, the Frost line sounds sincere I’ve seen it printed on inspirational posters. ‘ We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ is one of those lines that is quoted so often out of context it has lost its original meaning. Miranda Popkey’s ‘Topics of Conversation’ ![]()
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