Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Believe

At thirty, I was still footloose when most of my contemporaries had settled down with a definitive direction leading an organized life as an adult. If I could go back in time, I would tell my young self that life is work in progress and be courageous and believe in yourself. One certainly has much work to do alone before one can be a true and equal partner to anyone. That is what the protagonist in the new book by Lily King has come to realize. 



Writers & Lovers written by Lily King is  an enjoyable read. It is 1997, Casey Peabody, an aspiring writer  has arrived in Massachusetts without a plan. She is struggling to finish writing her first novel that she has spent  six years working on. She tries not to think about the crushing weight of her college loan debts. She is bereft about her mother’s unexpected death and also grieving about a  failed love affair with a poet whom she met at  a writing residency that she attended six weeks after her mother’s passing.


The narration is  in the protagonist’s voice. You sense her loss.

In the morning I ache for my mother. But late at night it is Luke I mourn for.’

 

She walks her landlord’s dog and waitress at a busy restaurant. When she catches herself in the mirror at the sink, she sees herself ‘looking beat up, like someone who has gotten ill and aged a decade in a few months. I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even

sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them.

 

All her writing friends have given up their writing dreams except for Muriel Becker who has been working on a novel set in World War II. There was Russell who appeared to be rigid and disciplined, got up at four-thirty every morning, ran five miles before going to work at a library. ‘But he was the first to surrender and go to law school. He  is a tax attorney in Tampa now.’Then there was Abby who took up realtor’s exam on her aunt’s advice and later she tried to tell Casey that she was using her imagination when she walked through the houses and invented a new life for her clients. There was also Nia who chucked her novel and married a Milton scholar ‘with excellent posture and a trust fund’.

 

Casey keeps writing, renting a potting shed from her brother’s college friend, Adam.

One day Adam asks Casey how many pages she has written and after hearing her reply saying probably a couple of two hundred, he mocks,

I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.'

 

In Casey’s narration,

I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t everything feels even worse.’

 

At thirty-one, it feels strange not being the youngest kind of adult any more. That's how Casey feels. She seems directionless but her one constant is the novel she has been writing. She is also a former child golf prodigy but she has since given that up. There are unresolved issues about her estranged dad. Her only writing friend, Muriel takes her to a book launch party for Oscar Kolton,  a famous writer who leads a fiction workshop  and later he becomes one of her  two love interests.

 

The novel is a moving story about  how hard  it can be to believe in yourself and  stay the course in working  towards your dreams. The author’s beautiful writing draws us into the character of  Casey, a quiet and elusive heroine who knows fully well that the novel she has been writing is her home and one place where she can retreat to despite all the uncertainties surrounding her life.  It is a story about Casey’s choices and sacrifices in holding onto her writing dream.

 

Writers & Lovers by Lily King is gorgeously written.

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