Break out the fancy dress, she’s got options
The title itself is a raised eyebrow.
Make that a side-eye in typeface, too.
“The Girls Are All So Nice Here,” oozes the cover of a new novel by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, a big fat as if lingering phantom-like on its edges.
“When I started it, I just called it Adult Suspense novel. I did not have a title,” the London, Ont.-based writer started to tell me the other day. But after she wrote the line into a key scene in the book — a dark liquorice-hued page-turner about the friends we keep, and the friends we don’t — it was obvious.
We Did a Bad Bad Thing in College: so go the broad strokes, and micro-genre, of this new one already making plenty of buzz. A 10-year reunion. Dubious narrators. Dual timelines. Status anxiety, and the pull of the past. Plus: a did she or didn’t she? mystery, going back to freshman year. Enough to get the book already scooped up in eleven territories, get optioned by AMC (the network behind “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad”), and has now even inspired its own lipstick.
“It’s a fuchsia. It’s beautiful,” 36-year-old Flynn said about the latter, adding that the lipstick made by the brand Finding Ferdinand, out of New York, “is perhaps the coolest thing that has ever happened to me.” Done in partnership with Simon & Schuster, the shade is called Ambrosia, one of those dubious people in “The Girls Are All So Nice Here.”
It is a nod, as well, to its cover image, which shows one lass applying lipstick to another, almost like they are preparing for battle. Ambrosia is something Flynn — the mother of three under three! — plans to sport during all those Zoomish book readings and interviews that are a staple of launching a book during a pandemic (it comes out March 9).
Though there is no party per se — in publishing, or otherwise — she will also don the black-and-silver dress she bought ages ago for the publication of the book. To, like, walk around her house. And post-online! Why not, right?
Having injected this book in my veins months back during the Christmas break, when I was sent an early copy — this wicked, spiteful novel warming me like a hot toddy — I remember thinking it was like “Heathers” meets “The Secret History.” So, I was curious what was the attraction for Flynn. She said this: “I think I was drawn to the dichotomy between the way society labels what is a nice girl and a mean girl. I wanted to explore that. I am also very intrigued by a toxic friendship. I did not plot it. I never do (she has written YA books before, but this is her first adult one). I started with the character Ambrosia … then this friend she makes, Sully, who has everything she wants … this idea of a teenager who was insecure and wanted to reinvent herself in college, as is so often the case.”
Cue lines from the novel, such as the one from page 23, when Ambrosia shares, “I learned at Westalyn that people don’t envy the girls who are the smartest and prettiest. They envy the ones who are smart and pretty without trying.” Or, the one on page 145, when we hear: “Nothing solidifies a group like casting someone out and having a common enemy.”
Exposure to the world of modelling helped form, in part, some of the author’s thinking about the book. Flynn — who has a touch of early Angelina Jolie about her and who lived in Athens, Tokyo and Paris in another life — told me that world was instructive in that, “you are living with other models — I became good friends with many — but also competing with them for jobs. You are competing with the same people who are your friends.”
The intense preoccupation with appearance — not uncommon, everywhere, but dialed up to a higher frequency, in the modelling industry — is also something that she channelled into the character of Ambrosia. She is, she said, “almost analytical about her appearance.”
Other influences? As an unabashed fan of reality TV — Flynn speaks fluent “Bachelor”-ese and can wax on forever about shows like “Selling Sunset” — she is obsessed with the social psychology and shifting alliances on those shows. Books-wise, her Holy Grail remains, the novel “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn. She first read it in one inhale during a long flight from Johannesburg to London, and couldn’t put it down — struck by its propulsion as a thriller, but also by its “social commentary.” Scarlett from “Gone with the Wind,” was an early literary north star.
At some point, our conversation turned to the “Mean Girls” characterization that reviewers will inevitably latch on to re: her book — a term which is its own horse-and-carriage in terms of gender norms. As someone who has long covered society and gossip, I told Flynn that I think there are plenty of Mean Boys to go around — they just do not get cast, or packaged, in the same way. Girls might communicate in ways that are more palpably bitchy in some ways, but anyone who thinks the Old Boys Clubs of both Parliament Hill and Capitol Hill, Bay Street or Wall Street, do not run on a mill of gossip and deception, are lying to themselves. (Exhibit A: Donald Trump’s onetime Twitter feed! Something that was more “Mean Girls” than anything in the Lindsay Lohan film!). But I digress.
So, how is the Canadian book sensation planning to celebrate her book birthday (besides putting on her aforementioned party dress) next week? “I am going to start my day with a mimosa,” Flynn laughed.
Raising a toast, no doubt, in the spirit of the dedication that frostily fronts her book: “For every girl who got what she wanted at a cost she couldn’t afford.”