Buzzed Books #96 by Samantha Nickerson

Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation

In March 2020, I was in New York City for vacation. I found myself in a bookstore on 34th Street. After looking at every shelf (because I’m compulsive), I found Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, on display at the storefront. I devoured it in several subway rides and a few hours in my hotel, and discovered that the pocket-sized, pastel cover is deceptive; this story is huge. Spanning seventeen years and several cities, Topics of Conversation chronicles the unnamed narrator’s journey from the time she’s a twenty-one year old English grad/nanny through her thirties, insistently creating opportunities to ruin her life. Most opportunities were erotic, and as a twenty-three-year-old recent English grad myself, the narrator fascinated me. I recommended Topics of Conversation to everyone I knew.

Topics of Conversation derives its title from its structure; most chapters are conversations between the narrator and other people, usually women. Not everything is dialogue—the narrator also spends much time in her own imagination, admitting that “I am often thinking of the better story because the actual story is so often boring” (57). Often the narrator zones in and out of her own conversations. Something her conversation partner says sparks a thought, and the partner fades into the background as the narrator explores her own memory. The combination of conversation and reflection is how the narrative unfolds. If the narrator’s wandering interiority seems rude, rest assured that she is aware and practices self-hatred as often as self-sabotage. Both involve a refusal of intimacy, which is the narrator’s main struggle as it contradicts the core truth of this novel: conversations are inherently intimate, but to be intimate is to be vulnerable, and replacing intimacy with eroticism masks vulnerabilities while providing the illusion of meaningful companionship without the satisfaction.

Popkey writes her narrator in a pessimistic, self-argumentative voice. The narrator often starts a sentence one way, redacts, admits to an exaggeration or an outright lie, then verbally decides to tell the truth and follows up with a continuation of the narrative. And yet, she writes the physical world in such detail that it seems impossible for her memory to be anything but perfect. For example, on a long walk to the hotel, she plans to find a man to have an affair with: “I don’t remember the hotel I decided on, honestly I don’t, but this next part I do, this next part is true. I remember walking the square, putting one foot in front of the other. My shoes were tight and the skin they exposed was swelling, red and plump, the soles of my feet slick with sweat” (77-78). Later, at the hotel bar she writes, “Inside my heels my feet were cooling but where the edges of the shoe leather cut into my flesh I could feel not blood but that clear, slick, sticky substance that precedes it” (79).

The way the narrator speaks to the reader is stylistically identical to how she speaks to other characters. The other characters all seem to have the same voice as the narrator, slight differences here and there, but the same speaking style and cadence. The effect is that all characters and conversations could be a figment of the narrator’s imagination, that details can always be exaggerated or false. It adds to the doubts about the reliability of the narrator’s memory, as does all of the alcohol she drinks.

While stylistically the voice is literate and flawless, Popkey makes a different decision regarding grammar. The narrator trusts the audience to understand that she knows the rules of grammar, but disregards them in favor of indulging her stream-of-consciousness. Often, the narrator is drunk. Popkey made sure to explicitly state that the narrator is drunk in these instances, but put in the effort to change the narrator’s clarity of thought so that the prose reflects her slurry state of mind. The effect truly feels like trying to sift through one’s own drunken thoughts..

At the start, the narrator seems to obsess over the bodies of the women she speaks with. In grad school, she admires a woman two years ahead who she identifies only as “the tenant.” At a gathering at the tenant’s apartment, the narrator sits on the floor while the tenant paces and speaks, clearly establishing the tenant as superior and herself as the inferior party within their relationship, although not unkindly. The dynamic feels like a student-teacher relationship, or like your friend’s hot older sister is telling you a story. The narrator likes to feel less powerful than others, enjoys wiser people bestowing confidence in her. To the narrator, such experiences seem validating and rewarding—but she mostly focuses on the fact that it’s erotic:

as I stared up at the smooth slope of [her] throat, at the declivity above her collarbone, a further thought entered my mind, not a thought but a wish, specifically the wish that she not get on with it, get it over with, stop talking. The wish was that she would go on talking so that I could go on staring. . . I didn’t know her that well, this tenant, this not-girl, this woman, but she was slightly older and v very beautiful and she carried herself like she was one body, a whole, not a collection o disjointed limbs, and for this reason I believed her to be very intelligent and I was in awe of her and a little bit in love with her and also I loathed her, not furiously or passionately but attentively, careful to keep the flame of—it wasn’t quite hatred; something closer to envy, something tinged with lust—anyway, whatever flame I was nurturing I was nurturing it with care, so that, on this night as on all nights, it was burning fierce. (36-37)

The narrator loves when people, especially women, confide in her. While nannying in exchange for a free vacation to Italy, she becomes close with the mother who employs her, Artemisia. She notices Artemisia’s nipples more than once and remembers the way Artemisia’s hand felt on her neck. The narrator states at the end of the first chapter:

Artemisia was, at the time of our conversation, no older than forty-four. In other words she was young and yet, because of my age, she seemed to me old, even quote-unquote wise, and therefore untouchable, metaphorically but also literally, and so even as I was coveting her [clothing]. . . it did not then occur to me that I might also be coveting the body beneath and below. Now I know that I am never more covetous than when someone tells me a story, a secret, the sharing of a confidence stoking in me the hunger for intimacy of a more proximate kind. (27-28)

The narrator is open to the intimacy these conversations bring, and makes no effort to repress sexual thoughts, although oddly enough she never engages in any sexual act with another woman. Perhaps Popkey’s intention was to distinguish between different types of intimacy and prove that conversations are intimate without necessarily becoming physically sexual. But, as stories must in order for a character to—I don’t want to say grow, but in order for a character to change, for story to happen, the characters must—challenge the truth that the story proposes.

As the narrator spirals through her affair, the resulting pregnancy, her divorce, single motherhood, alcoholism, and loneliness, she closes herself off to conversation; her responses become shorter. She shares less about herself and listens to others for longer. She loses either her desire or ability (maybe both) to be intimate. During this time, the language is simultaneously overly-descriptive of insignificant scenic details and not descriptive enough of the narrator’s conversation partners. Popkey succeeds in illustrating how the narrator’s self-inflicted trauma removes her from any kind of intimacy—even platonic. Her son’s babysitter shares details of her life, and instead of reciprocating like one is expected to do in conversation, the narrator denies that invitation of intimacy: “Sometimes I say nothing. Silence: the great conversation killer” (194).

Topics of Conversation explores intimacy, so along comes vulnerability, followed by weakness, followed by disgust. There is a new term for the feeling one gets when a partner commits such an egregious turn-off that the relationship can’t survive; perhaps it sounds juvenile, but getting the ick is an accurate description of the feeling. It’s revulsion, and it can happen because a partner refuses to trim their nose hairs or chews too loudly or doesn’t support same-sex marriage, but for the narrator it happens when men demonstrate vulnerability. It’s an idea that Artemisia plants in the narrator’s mind when she’s just twenty-one. Perhaps the narrator would have figured this aversion out on her own, but she narrator has already drawn parallels between herself and Artemisia because they both dated their professors—the difference is that Artemisia married hers. This wise, older, attractive woman who the narrator shares some commonalities with pours out her history to the impressionable narrator, and it would be naive to suggest that the conversation was not influential to her future relationships.

So Artemisia spins her story: she married Virgilio in Argentina. He was more powerful, more established, a father figure to her even though her relationship with her own father was fine. She liked the structure and she felt comforted by the constraints of their relationship. When they moved to New York—he to teach at one university and her to attend grad school at another—their roles reversed because her English was better than his. She didn’t mind taking care of him, but hated the way it affected his ego. Artemisia says:

One searches, in one’s choice of partner, for a kind of reflection. . . Often unconsciously. And often not an honest reflection. One searches for a better-than reflection. . . Virgilio had reflected well on me. . . But in New York, Artemisia continued, he shrunk. And as he shrunk, so did I. At first I remained silent. I was saying nothing. I was ashamed. But then, Artemisia shrugged, something changed. I became a little colder. A little less deferential. A little bolder. I began to treat him a bit like a child. Knowing what someone else does not: this defines the relationship between the adult and the child. (19)

He grew jealous, demanding to know her whereabouts at all times. She says,

We had not had sex in months. Not since our first weeks in New York. By choice. By my choice. It wasn’t that he was controlling—that he was trying to be controlling. In the end this is not what bothered me. It was that his desire to control, she paused. This desire, it stemmed not from his power but from its lack. It was his desperation that I despised. (22-23)

The narrator moves on with her life, presumably never sees Artemisia again, but the lesson sticks and is reinforced by other women the narrator admires. In chapter two, the Tenant tells a story about a girl who dressed nerdy and acted prudish. She says:

I didn’t drink before college, had greasy bangs, wore long skirts because I hated my calves, wouldn’t wear pants because I hated my thighs. We should have been friends. If not friends, allies. Instead I hated her. Her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses—she wasn’t hiding them and because she wasn’t hiding them I felt she was exposing me, too. (39)

The tenant confirms what Artemisia said, that weakness deserves to be met with hatred, and that people see reflections of themselves in others. Finally, we see the narrator practice this theory in her life when she calls the hotel man a dick, and he acts as though his feelings are hurt: “Either his voice was muffled because he was facing away or, annoying possibility, I’d actually wounded him. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes” (70). Later, after leaving her husband, she explicitly states that his weakness provokes “anger” and “disgust” (94). What was a seed of thought in Italy with Artemisia grows into the narrator’s entire emotional ecosystem.

Popkey’s narrator enters the bottom of sexual power dynamics in her early years. She dates her married professor who is dominant within their sex life. She traces her hatred of kindness and comfort in taking orders back to their first sexual encounter. This happens a few months before she nannies. The reader sees how uncomfortable she is in the authoritative position at first, and how she acclimates to it after realizing that the children enjoy discipline. For the first week, they take advantage of her weakness to get whatever they want, until they grow bored. Then, they want boundaries, respond only to punishment.

The second week was worse because they’d tired, already of getting what they wanted, the desire in these cases, being not merely to get what one wants but to feel as if one is getting away with getting what one wants, and so they began to create actual trouble, trouble of the damaging-the-hotel variety, which is how I found myself, on the evening of the tenth night, yelling, for the first time really shouting at Teo to stop using the serrated dinner knife to try to liberate the feathers from a pillow. He responded wonderfully, stopped right away and only cried a little, ate his frutti di mare quietly, didn’t ask after a gelato or a chocolate profiterole. And the whole time: his eyes wide, a small smile on his lips, pink and wet, hoping for a smile in return, a nod of approval. It’s true what they say, children really do crave boundaries. (6-7)

The narrator acclimates to her authority, but her brief stint in a power position only reinforces that she doesn’t enjoy it. In her personal relationships she always prefers to play the role of submissive child with one difference: where children crave boundaries, the narrator craves to be controlled. Her fixation on the fantasy of non-consensual sex is a contributing factor to her pattern of dating “controlling and cruel” men (204)—excluding her husband, who she admits was lovely, and who she left. She even says, during a scene of verbal foreplay in that hotel, actively having the affair that left her pregnant, “I hate making choices. . . I take direction.” And so she does. What follows is the only lengthy passage of male speech in the entire novel. The man, unnamed, describes to her exactly how he likes to control women during sex, and exactly how he must be violent if they become scared. The narrator never expresses fear in this scene, only fascination. She leaves her husband the next day.

Reflecting upon that decision, she realizes that her disgust for her husband stemmed from the lack of control he exercised over her. You want to almost but not actually finish your PhD? Okay. You want to work in HR? Okay. You suddenly want a baby just because our acquaintances have babies and you think having something to constantly care for will give you a sense of purpose? Okay. It’s okay, you can be mean to me; you’re going through a lot. What’s that? You had an affair? How about couple’s therapy? No, you’d rather leave? Okay. The narrator says,

What I wanted was direction and praise for following it. As a child these were easy to find. As an adult I learned that the only people who seemed inclined to give out both were my professors, married men, almost all of them. But you can’t marry your married professor. So instead I married John. John, who was so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener, who was everything a liberated woman is supposed to want. But then there was no one to pat me on the head for making the right choice. There was only John, who was so kind. Who was so kind and who wanted me to have desires of my own. Really it was a mean trick that the only one I developed was the desire to leave him… What I’m trying to say. . . is that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others. (97)

So maybe the narrator was on the right track with motherhood as a goal. She raises her son alone. She responds to his needs instantly. Mothering a baby makes sense for her — but what will become of the adult she must raise him into when all she’s good at is responding? She addresses this question as a fear:

When I worry about my son of course I worry about him dying, but when I have convinced myself that he is still breathing. . . what I worry about is how he’ll end up. I mean the possibility that he’ll end up like me. Not that I’m so horrible, just that I know I can do a great, and excellent, a perfect—I mean, my parents were fine. They weren’t amazing but certainly they did not encourage me to hate myself. They did not tell me to seek out men who were controlling and cruel, they did not suggest this is what I deserved. And if there was, during my formative years, a certain cultural consensus about what women wanted and how men should go about giving it to them, well, many others of my generation were smart enough to be skeptical of it. What I’m saying is that my life, like the lives of most people, lacks an origin story. I mean one with any explanatory power. Which means that my son could turn out any way and for any reason or for no reason at all. I’m not sure if it’s irony but here it is, at last I’ve found the thing I do want to control, and of course I can’t. (203-204)

Topics of Conversation is provocative, for older women likely reflective; for younger women educational, cautionary, eye-opening. For men, it may shed light on one version of the female psyche. The experimental structure is entertaining. The novel itself might prove inspiring to other writers who might feel stuck within the writing rules they learned in school. At 205 pages, it’s a lean novel, but I would suggest letting one chapter settle before starting the next because it’s easy to get lost in the details and miss Popkey’s deft exploration of the novel’s several themes. Topics of Conversation is an examination of intimacy in all its forms: platonic, romantic, parental, violent, sheltered, and stifled. Buy this book, reader.

Samantha Nickerson earned her MFA from Full Sail University. She is a waitress writer living in Orlando, Florida.

Buzzed Books #94 by Jan Elizabeth Watson

Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nketwi

As any writer knows, the quality of voice is sometimes elusive. It is something that you either have and can develop further or do not have until you begin to locate it within yourself. Nana Nkweta’s debut collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells (Graywolf Press), has a voice as pointed and well-aimed as a dart in the center of a bullseye.  While the ten stories in this collection often reflect the immigrant experience or the second-generation American experience, these are not the stories of struggles and assimilation and identity crises that one might expect from the subgenre. Rather, these are stories of characters who know who they are (or are on the verge of knowing) and are not afraid to convey this with force.

At turns fiercely intelligent, caustic, and lyrical, the language of Walking on Cowrie Shells shifts between Cameroonian idioms to American jargon to high-minded pontifications on race and class. Nkweta’s use of voice and characterization is perhaps most finely showcased in the collection’s first story, “It Takes a Village They Say.” The first half of the story is presented through the point of view of Mr. and Mrs. Saliki, who have adopted a young girl from Cameroon and brought them to live with them in suburban New Jersey: “For weeks Our Girl roamed our house merely touching things, eyes saucered, while we followed her hopefully with our own,” the narrators say (“we” and “our” are used to give them a joint identity; husband and wife are comically not individuated here). And, later: “In retrospect, it strikes us as hideous, our bottomless need for validation when we should have striven for her love. Back then, we needed a win, we habitual gold star scholars, six-figure earners, C-suite careerists.”

The setup of “It Takes a Village They Say” is a classic story of manners—a modern-day equivalent of parlors and sitting rooms— until “Our Girl,” Zora, commands the second half of the narrative and cuts through the niceties. Observant, contemptuous, and far cleverer than her conventionally aspirational parents, Zora is a self-described “hustler” who is not afraid to exploit the Salikis and use men for financial gain. Of one male prospect, Zora has this to say: “I looked at him and saw plenty: fattened calves, amber waves of grain. He looked at me and saw exotica… spears, teats… everything jutting.”

While Nkweti has much to show us about the inner lives of Black protagonists, she also dips into surrealism and plays against expectations of genre, inserting a story about a mermaid, a story about zombies, and a would-be whodunit into this collection—each with their own footing in our current cultural landscape. But there are earthier stories, too, and these are where the author’s voice brings her crashing to the forefront of new literary fiction. In “Rain Check at MomoCon,” adolescent Cameroonian girls at a comic book convention unexpectedly find themselves at the height of their powers. In “Schoolyard Cannibal,” the gifted, overachieving young narrator tries to understand her heritage and her place in the world amidst the din of what the world tells her it means to be African.

In “Night Becomes Us,” Zeinab, a restroom attendant at a nightclub, remembers her life in the war-torn homeland, where she survived a suicide bombing. Shattered, displaced, and distrustful of the American Dream, she is still quite capable of self-sufficiency and bold expression. The story ends where many others might begin, suggesting a greater life waiting beyond the page. Similarly, in “The Statitician’s Wife,” the closing line could just as easily be its incipit: “Elliot Coffin, Jr., maintained that he did not kill his wife, but he would be the first to admit that, statistically speaking, he could have.” Whether Coffin killed his Nigerian wife or was even charged with the crime is an almost incidental fact in a story that exposes the horrifying reality of how many Nigerian women are murdered by their spouses… a yearly total that often goes unreported.

Walking on Cowrie Shells closes with “Kinks.” The title alludes to a sexual liaison and the “free and unfettered” hair of Jennifer Tchandep, a young editor having an affair with the esteemed scholar and “Black blogosphere sensation” Kwame B. Johnson. Johnson is quick to dictate how she, as an American Cameroonian woman, should think and feel; he convinces her to endure twelve hours in a hairstylist’s chair to get tightly coiled Senegalese braids, warns her against the trappings of cultural imperialism, and even renames her “Jamila” to replace her less ethnic name. When Jennifer rebels and comes into her own, it is a triumphant and fitting end to a story collection that reverberates with themes of complicity, rebellion, and freedom.

“We are not what we once were but we are getting there,” notes a Cameroonian-American character in an earlier, epistolary story. At their most devastating and effective, Nkweta’s stories are peopled with characters like Jennifer who show us where there is and suggest where we go from here.

Jan Elizabeth Watson is the author of two novels: Asta in the Wings (Tin House Books, 2009) and What Has Become of You (Penguin Random House, 2014). She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was also a Teaching Fellow. Originally from Maine, she now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is at work on a third novel.

Buzzed Books #93 by Wanda Fuentes

Kimberly Dark’s Love and Errors

Kimberly Dark’s Love and Errors is an extremely compelling read that is enjoyable despite its heavy themes. Emotions rage on each page as victims, survivors, abusers, and bystanders perceive abuse differently, speaking to each other and themselves in the midst of being. Dark creates a world where breathing is an occupation and each new turn is another battle that must be won to live freely the next day.

Dark’s tone alternates between comic despair (“I’ll drown myself in that toilet”) and frank insight (“She is young / She is alive”). Trauma’s clinging offspring express themselves at different timelines of survivor’s journeys. Women frozen within trauma’s grip (“could’ve thrust / the stick into his belly / but for what? / More men in the next room.”) without any exit. Others after escaping its physical hold, remain vigilant to protect themselves and others from trauma’s snare (“I will not end up in a Mexican jail today / because she is a threat to maleness / and I need to be shown the error of my ways.”). Family members battle pain’s all-consuming dependency (“to be cast / as the cause of pain, and watch it become all / she was.”) seeking ways to extend life and love. All throughout, Love and Errors boldly penetrates straight into the war within the soul-seeking out the truths and myths of life beyond pain.

Love and Errors contains 38 poems that unravel the traumas of sexual violence, damaged families, cultural injustice, and caregiver burdens. From childhood rape to struggles of married life, Dark illuminates the various paths of survivors through girls, women, lovers, and siblings—independent and dependent. All throughout, Dark expresses an underlying message that even the worst relationships and violating memories can become a source of new strength and hope.

Relationships between trauma’s complex emotions and the body’s normal healing process are suggested (“I am made to be torn down / my pride to be shredded / I heal / get new skin / become new / beauty / is in the living”). These familiar comparisons bring forth hope as, with time, all things heal. Dark opens the door out of isolation, as one realizes they belong to a unique community, (“The way we hold our love / and errors, expectations / rooted into common ground; that’s how / we find each other and become capable / of doing what we feel we must do”) that struggles with fear and pain. By the end, readers are presented with new skills, viewpoints, and knowledge of a community which needs them—and they it.

Wanda Fuentes is a poet and social worker who lives in Orlando, Florida.