Writers and Lovers: A Review

Book: Writers and Lovers

My Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Author: Lily King

Genre: Literary fiction

Publisher: Picador

“I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”

I know at first this feels like a very unremarkable quote from an otherwise remarkable book, but trust me it is much more than that. This isn’t just a line from the book, it is the importance of expression in any form.

Set in the late 90s, Writers and lovers is a coming of age story of a thirty-year-old struggling through a fractured relationship with both writing and loving.

Casey Peabody is grief-stricken by her mother’s death and a wrecked relationship. To add to her ailments she has been writing her debut novel for the last 6 years, which, according to her, is nothing but a sloppy mess till now. She is in debt, lives in a shaky garage turned room, and waits tables at Harvard square.

It’s one thing to have a creative dream, it is another to see it till the end. Creative career pathways although appealing and self-realizing are very ambiguous and often require a high degree of perseverance. Many abandon their search for their big break and settle for something devoid of anything they wanted to have, but our protagonist here is surely looking down upon the likes of such people, and no matter what her current predicaments are, she believes in her one true dream, to be a writer.

I admire how the author has made us go through what a writer feels when they write something. In a particular instance, Maria who is reviewing Casey’s draft points out the places where the latter has described a character’s emotion instead of the reaction to the emotion-

‘Don’t tell us the girl is sad. Tell us she can’t feel her fingers. Emotions are physical.”

When our protagonist manages to fall for two men at the same time, who are poles apart, we see her struggle choosing one and letting go of the other. I personally feel the relationship part of the whole equation was quite unpredictable and realistic thus being very engaging.

The setting of losing a mother wretches your heart on several occasions. One that went through me like a pointed sword was when Casey remembers her mother and says-

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’ And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.

Casey’s mental wellbeing is clearly shattered to the very brink throughout the better half of the book and the reader might feel that she is quite self-indulgent at times, but let’s agree it’s hard to be grateful for the sunlight coming into your house when the entire roof is falling apart. So we can surely cut her some slack for her life is falling apart from all ends.

To me, this book was a blessing in disguise as I was going through a terrible reading slump, and this happened to be just the right book. I picked it up after seeing Noelle Gallagher’s reading blog on the same. I think I might rate it a 5/5 as more realizations strike me in the time to come but for now, I’ll save that 1 star for having the scope to read my favorite passages from the book and reflecting in the future. Nevertheless, I definitely recommend it to any reader, beginner or otherwise, any enthusiast, an artist or not, to read this book once just for how beautifully it is written and the kind of instant connection it will have with you.