4/14/2023 0 Comments Miranda popkey twitter![]() It’s inevitable that you are absorbing, especially when you’re younger and you’re not thinking as critically, all of these models without really knowing how influential they might end up being. But I don’t think I was the only woman who was surrounded by images of a certain kind of dynamic in popular culture in heterosexual relationships. ![]() My particular experience is quite narrow-middle class, white, cis, straight. The novel is not meant to speak for all women. In my mind this is very much a novel about being socialized as a woman in a particular moment. So there’s both a sense of ambivalence toward relationships, and of not being able to trust one’s own desires as a woman. And then there are women who, some of them the same women, sabotage their relationships with “kind” men, as the narrator does. The women almost enjoy the relationships because the power dynamics are very clear. MP: I do want to answer this question but I’m not totally sure exactly what you’re getting at.ĪC: Several of the women who appear in the book talk about having relationships with older men, and to me, I guess there’s a strong ambivalence toward that. I was wondering if you, especially in depicting these relationships with older men, could talk about how ambivalence played a role in your writing. We were talking about good reasons that women might be angry.ĪC: The voice of this novel, with the narrator especially, there’s such a strong sense of ambivalence, which I really loved because, at least for me, ambivalence is a really productive state for inquiry. It certainly played a role-just having that be in the air and having women’s anger be a topic of news, and not in a negative way. ![]() I don’t know why, but that was a way that things got unlocked. ![]() I worked in publishing for a long time and there was quite a spirited discussion about various people who had potentially been sexual harassers or had been otherwise inappropriate. Suddenly there was much more of a conversation about these kinds of relationships in which someone has much more power than the other person, and the conversation expanded so that it was possible to also talk about situations where the power dynamic was more equal, but still troubling. The most obvious thing to say is that what happened in the fall of 2017, the allegations about Harvey Weinstein-sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, rape-all of those started coming out. I tried for a while and it wasn’t working for whatever reason. I was interested in trying to write a story about that somehow. But I have been in relationships where the power dynamic was unequal in a way that was both appealing and, in retrospect, damaging. I, to be clear, never had an affair with any of my professors. She talks about having an affair with a professor. Miranda Popkey: One entry point was that I had wanted, and I’d been trying for some time, to write about a particular relationship dynamic that I have experienced, which is exaggerated in the story that the narrator tells when she is at a new moms’ group. What was your entry point? How did you navigate fitting all of this into the novel? I had the chance to talk with Popkey over the phone about her book, as well as women’s anger, power dynamics in relationships, how desire is formed by the stories to which we’re exposed, and the ways narrative functions in our lives.Īlexandra Chang: You write that you believe a writer shoves into her first novel “more or less everything she has ever thought, seen, read, loved, hated, experienced.” In your book, you do tackle so many topics-desire, power dynamics, class, art, motherhood, anger, friendship, storytelling, and more. They are spiked with equal doses of hurt and want. The women of Popkey’s novel are searching, skeptical, and hyperaware. “There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current… This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden,” reflects the narrator as she listens to another woman tell the story about her marriage’s end.
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