To most, the self-mocking post would easily be read as an attempt to cope, but my husband was confused, hurt. My husband doesn’t use Twitter, has a limited Instagram presence, is gently baffled by the world of social media his Internet is the New York Times and weird animal stories. Every like from followers signaled that I had handled an embarrassing episode appropriately (by brushing it off), and that I could still look cute after twenty-plus minutes of uninterrupted bawling. Joking about the attack signaled - to me - that it had passed. In short: the attack hadn’t really been “lil.” In context, the diminutive was deliberately deflationary, something between a wink and an eye-roll at my (hours) past self. At some point, I’d started yelling at my husband because he could understand my distress only imperfectly. “Now I’m going to see a metal show.” I can’t now remember the cause of it, but crying had been involved, certainly some hyperventilating, too, in all likelihood. “Earlier I had a lil anxiety attack,” the caption reads. (In truth every interaction, online and off, provides an opportunity to dissemble, but.)įor example: A few months ago, I posted a picture of myself on Instagram in which I’m standing in front of a mirror wearing an acid green tank top tucked into worn, high-waisted jeans. Miranda Popkey reads from Topics of Conversation January 14 at Left Bank Books.Many of us live double lives, presenting one version of ourselves to real-world intimates and another to those - friends and unknowns alike - estranged by the filters of the Internet. “But maybe that just goes to prove the point that I needed a kind of permission.” “I’m not unaware of the irony that the novel comes into existence because a male told me, ‘Maybe that should be a novel,’” Popkey says.
When she answered no, he suggested that she consider it. All of it is told by that unnamed narrator, who allowed Popkey to uncork all of that anger in a voice that “is quite critical, self-lacerating, and,” she says, “I hope, funny.” As Popkey was working on the thesis that would become her novel, a visiting fiction writer asked whether she had plans to turn a two-part short story and an unrelated third piece she’d written just for the author’s critique into a book. The book’s sections depict an older woman recounting navigating marriage while vacationing in Italy a graduate student sharing a cautionary tale about a predatory man in Ann Arbor, Michigan two friends discussing one’s affair and inevitable breakup. “I was interested in exploring bad desire-desires that one may not want to have but are there anyway-and trying to explore what possibly could be the origin of these desires and what does it mean to be possessed of a desire that you know is yours but you also want to reject and that you recognize as somehow alien to you or somehow harmful to you.” It’s a structural technique that Popkey credits to author Rachel Cusk, deployed between the unnamed narrator and other women discussing their lives, relationships, sexuality, anger, and, most notably, desires. The result was Topics of Conversation, out January 7, which, as the title suggests, is carried by discussions. “There was a certain amount of anger about the ways in which I had unconsciously been formed by cultural products that were made by someone whose desires were to harm women or humiliate women or get something from get something from women, no matter their interests in giving that thing up,” she says.
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So her environment seeped into her work, Popkey says, as she found inspiration in “the ongoing series of revelations in which men in the workplace abused their power in order to sexually harass, sexually assault, and rape women who had less power than they did.” Specifically, it was Harvey Weinstein-the film producer who allegedly assaulted more than a dozen women and is slated to stand trial in early 2020-and Popkey’s realization of how much influence he’d exerted on her own life from afar. It was 2017, on the cusp of the #MeToo era, and focusing on writing felt selfish, says the author, who was earning her MFA at Washington University at the time. Miranda Popkey was angry when she began writing Topics of Conversation.
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