![]() She joins the narrator one night on their hotel suite's terrace, and, over wine and cigarettes, soliloquizes on her two marriages to older, esteemed professors. Artemisia Perez, an elegant, New York-based Argentinian psychotherapist "no older than forty-four" has hired the narrator - her daughter's friend - to accompany the family on vacation to Italy to mind her 7-year-old twin sons. The first conversation, with the mother of the narrator's college classmate, has the flavor of a Rachel Cusk interchange - which is to say, it's mostly a one-way confession. But above all, the vagaries of female desire, which for some is about a wish to be cared for, while for others takes the form of wanting to control or be controlled. Irritation with weak or overly dependent men. Female subjugation, exploitation, and humiliation. Self-sabotaging behavior, including deliberately harmful lies. What do these women talk about when they talk about love? Affairs with older professors. Popkey app series#Her unnamed narrator, a troubled young woman, reports on a series of conversations with various other women - a classmate's mother, fellow graduate students, fellow single mothers - over a span of 17 years following her graduation from college in 2000. In Miranda Popkey's slim but potent first novel, Topics of Conversation, sex, desire, and failed relationships are ever at the fore. Not just from accused men proclaiming their innocence, but from a wave of novels (including Mary Gaitskill's This Is Pleasure, and Sally Rooney's Normal People) reminding us that relationships and female desire can be complicated and quirky. You knew it was bound to happen: the pushback against the #MeToo movement, the arguments for nuance. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Topics of Conversation Author Miranda Popkey ![]()
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