It’s been a long time since I read a book that had a straightforward happy ending. I enjoyed it: it gave me hope. Modern literature never ends on “Reader, I married him.” More like: “Reader, I married him. And that was the beginning of our problems.” It’s like we can’t accept that there can be such a thing as happiness – it always has to be equivocal, and coloured by upcoming death. It’s like we think we are too good for happiness.
WRITERS AND LOVERS is about a woman in her thirties who is deeply in debt (student loans), recently bereaved (her mother), recently dumped (poet!), and has been working on her first novel for six long years, with no end in sight. She pays the bills by waiting tables. Clearly Lily King has waited tables, because there is a lot of detail on this, and I gained a lot more respect for what is involved in waiting tables.
Here she is thinking about this ex-boyfriend, or was he a boyfriend, this was part of the problem:
You taste like the moon, Luke said out in that field in the Berkshires. Fucking poet. On the path a few people are holding hands, drinking from bottles, lying in the grass because they can’t see all the green goose poop.
For all she is now so miserable she has two competing suitors, and much of the book involves her going back and forth between them. She also receives rejections for her novel, and I was reminded how many people sacrifice hugely so we eventually get to those few people who manage to do something wonderful. It’s like the gods of art demand blood.
At one point she starts to have what appears to be a breakdown. This for me is always a red flag: here we go with ‘dream sequence’ type writing, but we avoid this. She sells her novel, she chooses her man: happily ever after.