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Miranda popkey twitter11/2/2022 ![]() ![]() ![]() Miranda Popkey, Topics of ConversationĪfter my reading hiatus I picked up Topics of Conversation again. Nothing binds two people like sharing a secret. And that unwrapping, that denuding, is always, inevitably sensual. This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden. This is regardless of the gender of the people involved, of their sexual orientations. Sometimes this current is so hot it all but boils and other times it’s barely lukewarm, hardly noticeable, but always the current is present, if only you plunge your hands just an inch or two farther down in the water. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Her book and play reviews are insightful and I can see that her reflections on the work of others greatly influenced Topics of Conversation. Reading some of her extensive non-fiction pieces, I got a better feel for her writing style and voice. But I wanted to finish, so I did some research on Popkey and read some of her other writing. It was distracting.Ībout one-third of the way through the novel I stopped reading for about a week. I found myself mentally creating new paragraphs or changing punctuation in order to make the writing flow better, which is not something I generally like to do while trying to enjoy a book. I’ve struggled to get into some authors’ writing styles before, and this time it took me longer than usual, but I think it had more to do with the editing than the writing itself. Miranda Popkey, Topics of ConversationĪt first, I thought that I didn’t care for Popkey’s writing style – it is very stream-of-consciousness and rather jumpy, like you’re listening in on a real conversation (hmmm). Of course it was true that I wasn’t ready to get married, but this wasn’t the problem, the problem was that my boyfriend, who was also my former professor, already was. Ready to get married, yes? This was not what I had been going to say. You were going to say, If we’d been ready. If we’d been, and here I paused because I hadn’t yet lied outright and didn’t want to, didn’t want to lie to her, and yet explaining the situation also seemed impossible, but then Artemisia smiled and I stopped talking, relieved. I laughed and she frowned and I said, quickly, It’s just that I’m young and he’s got a job in New York and it didn’t, a helpless hand gesture, come up. He didn’t want to follow you? Artemisia asked. I’m not, she said, disturbing you? And when I said no she asked what I was writing and I said, A letter to my boyfriend, and then, Or, not my boyfriend, we broke up, before the summer. The narrator’s thought processes are interpolated into these conversations, making the narrative difficult to follow at times, but faithfully representing how we experience internal dialogue during actual conversations. The chapters center around conversations the protagonist has with women she knows as she attempts to reconcile female desire, her dislike of decision-making, her antipathy toward marriage, and the all-encompassing-ness of motherhood with societal expectations and norms regarding the same. #Miranda popkey twitter series#In a series of vignettes, an unnamed female protagonist offers glimpses into discrete periods of her life from college and graduate school, to marriage, divorce, and motherhood. Topics of Conversation is not an instant gratification read to be sure – the reader will need to spend some time with this one. ![]() However, like conversations, which can often have awkward beginnings, the promised snark and sexiness took a while to develop. I had heard that the book was a provocative read, and I was ready to immediately like it. I greatly enjoyed Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, although I toiled through the first seventy pages or so and I started writing a very different review than what this one turned out to be. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: conversation is flirtation. Provocative as in to provoke, as in to provoke interest. ![]()
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