Writers, lovers and everything in between
Writers & Lovers
Lily King Grove
Rule of thumb: Don’t write a novel about trying to write a novel. It’s cliché and insular and lazy. Just don’t do it.
Unless it’s this novel — this wonderful, witty, heartfelt novel by Lily King called Writers & Lovers.
I’ve followed King’s career since her debut two decades ago, when she published The Pleasing Hour about an American au pair in Paris. With The English Teacher (2005) and especially Father of the Rain (2010), she established a reputation for writing insightful, emotionally piercing stories. But she never attracted the audience she deserved until she left the confines of domestic fiction and published Euphoria (2014), a wry historical novel about Margaret Mead in New Guinea.
That change must have felt to her like a risk, but it was not nearly as reckless as what she’s up to now. Writers & Lovers is a funny novel about grief, and, worse, it’s dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness.
The narrator of Writers & Lovers is Casey, a 31-year-old woman clinging to her dream of a creative life after all her MFA friends have settled down, married up and sold out.
When the novel opens in the 1990s, Casey is living alone in a converted potting shed in Cambridge, Mass. Casey has spent six years on her novel, barely supporting herself with an exhausting restaurant job that gives her horrible hours and no benefits. Giving up now would be sensible but demoralizing, an admission that all her past struggles were for nothing. Her last boyfriend, Luke, was a poet who worried that “the Devil” might be behind their relationship while he wrote about bees and dead children. Now Casey’s alone again, trudging through a perpetual state of shock at the sudden loss of her mother. Her sorrow sends her into fits of crying, which the manager at the restaurant finds annoying.
I know: I’m doing a horrible job of making this novel sound funny or romantic. But this grim terrain is what makes the arc of this story so enchanting. All of these tragedies and obstacles are drawn with stark realism and deep emotional resonance.
Jane Austen said, “Man has the advantage of choice; woman only the power of refusal,” but Casey is determined to hold out for a plot on her own terms.