Topics of Conversation

October 15, 2019
An unnamed narrator navigates female identity--her own and in general--through a series of conversations that span the course of 20 years in Popkey's painfully sharp debut. Popkey begins in Italy. Our narrator, a grad student in English, is spending August on vacation with a more glamorous friend's family, earning her keep minding their 7-year-old twins. One night, the mother, an Argentinian psychoanalyst, recounts her own romantic history, a lesson in the gendered dynamics of power. But what captivates our narrator is the woman's certainty, her belief in her own story. "I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives," she recalls. This is the question that propels the novel; it is a book of ideas--about power and gender, about desire, about loneliness and rage--but it is also, at its core, a novel about storytelling, about the quest for a stable narrative that can explain us to others and to ourselves. Ten years later, at an art exhibit in San Francisco--the work is by a Swedish video artist whose subject is "female pain"--our narrator and a friend discuss heartbreak with detached cruelty. This is the underlying premise of their relationship, that they are both bad people; or at least, that is the story they tell themselves and so the story that unites them. Two years after that, in Los Angeles, divorced, the narrator is armed with another story to explain her behavior to herself: "that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others." The first sections of the novel are incisive, often biting, but mannered, as though the narrator's own oppressive self-consciousness has rubbed off on the prose. But halfway through, at a mommy group in Fresno, the novel takes a turn, going from cool to coolly wrenching, as Popkey layers something like tenderness. A rich and rigorous dissection of how we construct who we are.

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November 25, 2019
The women in Popkey’s astute debut bristle with wanting. Readers meet the unnamed narrator in Italy, “twenty-one and daffy with sensation,” where she is working as a nanny for a well-off friend’s younger brothers while her friend leaves her behind in favor of Greek tourists she’s met on the beach. In her third week, she has a late-night conversation with her friend’s mother, Artemisia, an Argentinean psychoanalyst, about their paralleled romantic histories with much older men, both their former professors. These conversations about power, responsibility, and desire, often as they manifest in relationships with men, provide the backbone for the subsequent sections of the novel, which follow the narrator through breakups with friends, with lovers, and motherhood. As the years progress, the narrator’s hyperawareness and cheeky playfulness when it comes to her narrative as something she owns, grows as well. At a new moms meetup in Fresno 14 years after that night in Italy, the narrator asks the rest of the moms to share “how we got here.” The story she herself shares is an echo of the one she told Artemisia, but better, the details burnished and editorialized. Popkey’s prose is overly controlled, but this is nonetheless a searing and cleverly constructed novel and a fine indication of what’s to come from this promising author.

November 1, 2019
In a series of place- and date-stamped chapters, the narrator of Popkey's debut catalogs the pivotal conversations of her young adulthood. In "Italy, 2000," just graduated from college, she accompanies her friend's family abroad and learns the story of her friend's mother's first marriage, to her professor, putting the narrator's own relationship with her professor into new relief. The bulk of the novel unfolds in California a decade later. In 2012, after many plans made and unmade, she sleeps with a man who isn't her husband in San Francisco. In Fresno two years later, she and a few new friends share the stories of how they all came to be single moms. Popkey is up to the task of her interesting approach, seamlessly weaving dialogue into actions and backstories (sometimes without quotes) and letting it drive the story. As her narrator notes: "There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current." Popkey captures this idea over and over again in her talking book of a woman's maturation and evolving desire.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)