The end of the affair
Memories of a violent relationship haunt a woman with a calmer, conventional new life.
Sarah is a young art teacher, shacked up with a nice guy in his mother’s fancy apartment. The livin’ is easy, the loving should be, too – but Sarah is consumed by the memory of an affair with Matthew, a man 20 years her senior. Almost love? Hardly. Their relationship was all sex, on Matthew’s terms, in scummy hotel rooms. And it was violent.
Matthew’s a prick, you’re thinking. But Irish writer Louise O’Neill is more complex than that. Thesis: “Sarah was afraid that he might have broken her and she was afraid that she might have been the one who asked to be broken.”
It becomes clear that whatever damage Matthew did, Sarah was already badly broken. She is selfish and bitter, a curdled mixture of entitlement and self-loathing. She’s a terrible flatmate, a worse friend – her betrayal of her best mate, a fellow artist, is particularly diabolical.
Why keep reading Almost Love? Partly because Sarah’s a slow burn – we don’t realise quite how messed up she is until we’re invested and interested in how the messing-up happened.
And partly, because the writing is exceptional: visceral, controlled, confronting. Sarah touches a painting by her boyfriend’s mother, whom she resents, “the coagulated oil like clots of blood beneath her fingers”. She imagines waking up with the same safe, nice guy every morning, counting the vertebrae in his skinny back, “and she could feel her throat closing over”. During an encounter with Matthew, “panic scratched its nails against my ribs”.
This is novel No 3 and O’Neill’s first for the adult market – although in terms of content, it’s arguably a whisker less “adult’ than her 2015 YA Asking For It. In Sarah, I see lashings of that book’s Emma, the brattish 18-yearold who is drunk and high when she is raped by a pack of boys at a party.
Raw and brilliant, Asking For It won numerous awards and started a national conversation about rape culture.
If there’s a conversation to come out of Almost Love – and O’Neill, a columnist for the Irish Examiner, certainly has the profile and platform to launch one – it will be about the grey areas. What constitutes abuse? What happens to consent when power is in play or when one party is utterly in thrall to the other?
But all that aside, O’Neill has pulled off an astonishing magic trick here. She’s turned the obsession of an unlikeable woman into a terrific story, and in it, I suspect many of us will see glimpses of our own stories.
ALMOST LOVE, by Louise O’Neill (Hachette New Zealand, $34.99)