Miranda popkey12/28/2023 ![]() The voice, so light and elusive, performs one paradox after another, until paralysis becomes the natural and desired solution. She also knows how competitive all that can get. She is alert to the moment when story turns into self-enclosure, or narcissistic display. Popkey understands the intimate and seductive purposes of self-disclosure. It is hard to know if these stories are chosen to illustrate some essential or unsayable truth of female sexuality. for a book that deals in the paradoxes of desire, very little is described below the waist. though there is much discussion about morality and desire in this book, it asks no radical question about why women in particular should feel beholden to people who like them, love them, or desire them. The most we can do is listen to her story. She doesn’t arrive at a totalizing, liberated endpoint. I liked being inside her mind it felt natural. Popkey presents us with a shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling these amorphous notions of pain, desire and control, all the while quietly noting their clichéd contrivances in snarky, dark humor. ![]() Her style also conjures the rambling (and occasionally solipsistic) meditations on self-definition in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, and aspires to reproduce the rhythm of spoken communication in Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1968 novel-in-dialogue, Talk. Narrative agency is what interests the author, her manner of parceling out information evoking at times the fragmentary and diaristic sensibilities of Jenny Offill’s Dept. Popkey’s sentences careen breathlessly as her halting, staccato prose mirrors the 'churning' within the narrator’s mind-the pulsing interior dialogue, the em-dash-laden reasoning back and forth with herself.
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