Or they seem to want someone else to make things happen for them. MCAMMON: I'm struck by the fact that there are so many women in this book, including the narrator herself, who often don't seem to know exactly what they want. And something I find sort of frightening - that the fact that it's just - that that's in my brain. But certainly, I have the sense that it was possible that the men around me knew my own desire better than I did. And it's certainly in this moment, you know, post #MeToo where we are re-evaluating some of those themes that, as you say, just pervade our discussions about female sexuality. I think that's such a - I mean, that's such a big theme throughout the book - is sort of these negotiations around power and consent and desire and the tensions that, I think, a lot of women feel. What I saw was a man sort of forcing himself on a woman and the woman realizing, ah, yes, this is, in fact, what I desire. When you see the same sort of thing over and over again, I think it's possible that you come to want that thing in your own life. And Adrian is trying to get out of the apartment. And there's a knife in it for some reason. There's a mattress against the wall - vertically.
#Miranda popkey instgram movie#
MIRANDA POPKEY: A moment I thought a lot about as I was writing this novel is a moment in the movie "Rocky." There's a moment when Rocky has taken Adrian out on a date, and they're back at his apartment.
#Miranda popkey instgram how to#
So it's fitting her book is called "Topics Of Conversation." Miranda Popkey says she was thinking about the kinds of messages women often absorb about how to think about those topics.
Popkey's story follows an unnamed woman over 17 years as she opens up about topics like love and infidelity, desire and power. It’s a slender volume with the power of lightning.In her debut novel, Miranda Popkey explores the kinds of raw and vulnerable conversations that happen between women in private - conversations over a cup of coffee, a bottle of wine or on a long car ride, discussions we don't always know how to start that sometimes take an unexpected turn. In the moment, the novel is riveting, disturbing and thought-provoking. In the abstract, Topics of Conversation is about social and sexual power, anger, envy, pain, honesty, self-delusion and female identity. Only at the end of the novel does the narrator see glimmers of redemption. She is keenly observant, but her sense of self wavers, and her self-knowledge tends toward the self-lacerating. The narrator thinks she’s the smartest person in the room, and she probably is. “I did the worst thing a woman can do, even though men-you know, you must know, men do this all the goddam time,” the woman tells her. They end up getting drunk together and going for a swim, and the other woman confesses that she abandoned her child. In a later chapter, the narrator crashes into the shopping cart of another woman at a Vons grocery store in Santa Barbara. The narrator observes that “beneath the first premise of our friendship was the understanding that we were, both of us, bad people.” She admits she had an affair, but later she confesses that she invented the affair to get out of the relationship. The friend is distraught because of her breakup with her boyfriend. In one chapter, the narrator meets a friend at a San Francisco museum where a Swedish artist is exhibiting work about female subjugation. Most of these women are social outsiders. Each has at its center a conversation with another woman or sometimes several women. Subsequent chapters span 20 years of the narrator’s life. Miranda Popkey’s first novel is a slender volume with the power of lightning. The narrator never tells the psychoanalyst that she, too, has had a love affair with a professor.
Later in this chapter, the psychoanalyst describes the dynamics of her first marriage to one of her college professors. The woman changes out of her bikini in front of the uncomfortable narrator and tells her that the boys are timid, eager to please and need to be punished.
Seeking advice on how to manage her rebellious young charges, the narrator knocks on the bedroom door of the boys’ mother, an elegant Argentinian psychoanalyst. In her off hours, the narrator reads Sylvia Plath’s journal and describes herself as “daffy with sensation, drunk with it.” In the opening chapter of Miranda’s Popkey’s bedazzling, psychologically fraught first novel, the unnamed narrator is a graduate student spending the summer in Italy, caring for the young twin brothers of a wealthy classmate who has already begun distancing herself.
0 kommentar(er)
