Writers & Lovers

Writers & Lovers is not a light read or a beach read. It is clearly literary fiction and the intended audience is people who are literary themselves. With that being said, it can come off a little pretentious. It is slow moving because it is much more focused on character development and literary elements than on a fast-paced plot. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good read. For me, it was a satisfying read, but it probably won’t be one of my favorites of the year.

It took me a while to get into, but I did find myself invested in it. I wanted Casey to get her life together and have her dreams come true. Now that she is in her thirties, most of her friends have given up on their creative passions and pursued more “normal” careers and lives. Along the way, Casey writes and falls in and out of love with other writers and struggles to deal with the grief of losing her mother suddenly. So, it felt like a book for an audience of writers and other creative artists.

I feel like this one quote from the book sums up the whole book itself: “It’s really a book about art and becoming an artist and all the ways it ruins people, actually.”

It is difficult becoming an adult, at times, and in particular when you are in your 30s. Not settled, no profession of means, no permanent relationship, no offspring, just a muddle. Casey feels all of this and more. Full of debt that grows larger everyday, a job as a waitress, living in a potting shed, and writing a novel that is just taking forever.

Casey aka Camila, lives near Boston, commutes to her waitress job in Boston on her banana bike. She has friends, a jerk for a landlord and her book. She tries not to think too much about her top three worries, her mothers recent death, her huge student loans, and the man she met this summer, a married poet who swept her off her feet. While she is involved in the grief she feels from her mothers death, she is trying to live, to be kind and care about others, without her need to hide all the feelings. Everything around her feels the cynicism, that is the way to make it through the day.

This novel by Lily King is fresh, vibrant, the characters leap off the page. In this day of digital devices, it is refreshing to have a young woman finding her way with every mistake she makes, but holding onto her dreams. She wants love, a family, but her grief and her uncertainty are holding her back. Casey has two lovers, a promise of a better job, and must make decisions. She is aware of her peccadilloes, and, in this way she is learning her craft. Her writing carries her, and her friends and her work reinforce this need. She has to write she says not because she thinks she has something to say. She writes because when she doesnt everything feels worse. This is not nothing.

Recommended. prisrob 03-03-2020

Words to describe the writing: Pretentious, cliche, and filled with platitudes.

I wanted to like this book, but the main character is just over-privileged and annoying.

I was also disappointed that the tension in the plot comes down to her love life in a very chicklit style rather than a deeper and more intriguing study of what it truly means to write and what it means to be a woman trying to access deeper truths in her writing that she can’t seem to get in her real life.

Could’ve been much, much better.

I Kindled this the day it came out and now that I’ve finished I can finally resume my life, reluctant though I may be to leave this congenial narrator and her finely rendered world. This is literary fiction of the best kind, not bogged down in overwrought sentences or hyper-emotionalism. The prose is clear and concise and the relationships between Casey and the two writers in her life are finely drawn. Her monetary woes and the death of her mother (we know from the start) and the problems with her father are believable and not sentimentalized. The setting is Boston, and you feel like you’re there, but her descriptions are always on point and never gratuitous. But mostly, I just liked the whole deal! Lily King is a smart writer and made me feel like a smart reader.

I did not finish this novel, so maybe it became a great read at some point, but I could not get there. The main character is depressed and describes in detail her bike ride to work and on which roads she cried – there were quite a few. Her day is pretty detailed with unimportant conversations with people at work, no one very likable. She’s in debt that she can’t get out of. Did she not know when she went to Europe that she went to college and grad school on loans that would have to be paid back? I gave up after awhile because I really didn’t care what happened next. It was depressing, self involved and boring. I think a novel should get your interest early on and this did not do that.

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