![]() ![]() The topics of conversation include: the rape fantasy, the ethics of procreation, Plath’s poem “Daddy” (“Every woman adores a Fascist”), and a video art exhibition on female pain. The narrator assiduously listens to other women tell their stories for her, the highest form of intimacy is perhaps the act of divulging. ![]() Ten piecemeal conversations such as this one cohere into something like a young woman’s coming-of-age story, tracing her evolving sense of narrative and her place within it. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives.” She’s mesmerized by the idea of certainty. The narrator admires how “Artemisia knew herself so well and I, at 21, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. She sits on the Italian coast reading Sylvia Plath’s diary and carefully describing the three swaths of blue that make up the water one night she stays up late talking - mostly listening - to Artemisia, the mother of the children she nannies. The novel’s first conversation takes place in 2000, just after the narrator has graduated from college. “The trick was picking the right moments,” she says, pouring another glass. She hopes to excavate some sort of arc, a scaffolding of her inner thoughts, from these discursive flashes. As Rachel Cusk’s narrator observes in “Transit,” another novel in conversations, “The moments when life could be observed in a meaningful arrangement were rare.” Popkey’s narrator traverses a series of inflection points over the course of 17 years. “Everything that had ever happened could never be integrated into something coherent,” thinks the unnamed narrator of Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, “Topics of Conversation,” drinking glass after glass of white wine, her son asleep in the next room.
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