Topics of Conversation

Chapter 2



Ann Arbor, 2002
 
There s this girl I know. She took a drag of her cigarette, exhaled. We were in her apartment, large but the space poorly apportioned, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and then a kitchen jutting off a wide central hallway that served also as the living room, its oor hardwood, dark and scuffed; earlier that night I d ripped a hole in my stockings, snagged the soft fabric on a splinter. I was sitting on the oor. We were graduate students in the Midwest and our stipends had rented us more space than we knew what to do with. John had been at the party but he had left and it was only women now, four of us: me (female pain in Jacobean revenge tragedies); the apartment s tenant (American literature since 1981); Laura (the Bloomsbury group, with a focus on Virginia Woolf); and a blonde with heavy eyelids, those eyelids now closed because she was, her head resting against the wall, asleep (female narratives of the Civil War). Because Laura and the tenant were on chairs and I was on the floor and the other woman on the oor was asleep, I felt myself an acolyte or a novice, felt Laura and the tenant to be my teachers. Mostly the tenant. I craned my neck. The tenant was speaking.

This girl I know. Knew. We went to undergrad together. We weren t close, but I d see her around. Not at parties, but in class, or she d host she called them soirées: cheese and crackers and aky puff pas-tries stuffed with meat and I d be invited. We had coffee, lunch, a handful of times. Nice girl. Mousy, shy. Had braces her freshman and sophomore years. Pretty. But unpolished. Hair always back in a pony-tail. Overalls. Actual overalls. Like the nerdy girl before the makeover, the makeover that is destined to be, that is a priori successful, because the girl, of course, she was always hot, she was just she waved the hand holding the cigarette wearing weird glasses or whatever. She stubbed the cigarette out. Anyway, her junior year, this was after the braces came

Miranda Popkey

Named a best book of the year by TIME, Esquire, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Glamor, and Bustle

Lyrical. . . . Smart and raw.
The Washington Post

Sally Rooney-esque. . . . Popkey's sentences careen breathlessly as her halting, staccato prose mirrors the churning within the narrator's mind. . . . A shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling these amorphous notions of pain, desire and control.
The New York Times Book Review

Masterly.
The New Yorker
 
Electrifying. . . . Shrewd and sensual, Popkey's debut carries the scintillating charge of a long-overdue girls night.
O, The Oprah Magazine

Slim but potent... has the flavor of Rachel Cusk. . . . Provocative. . . . Sure to spark conversation.
NPR
 
Formally adventurous and blisteringly current. . . . In glittering prose, Popkey illuminates the performative nature of storytelling, assessing the degree to which the stories we tell about our lives are fictions.
Esquire
 
As [the narrator] explores her own history through a shifting lens of female rivalries and friendships, the book's surface coolness begins to peel away, revealing the raw, uncommon nerve of a radically honest storyteller.
Entertainment Weekly
 
Masterfully controlled, delightfully chilly.
The Boston Globe
 
Icily intelligent. . . . Reading Topics of Conversation [is] as thrilling as being told a secret.
The San Francisco Chronicle
 
Perceptive, biting. . . . There s much to relate to and dogear in this slim book.
Real Simple
 
Bedazzling. . . . A slender volume with the power of lightning.
BookPage
 
Rich and rigorous.
Kirkus Reviews