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#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today
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A New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection
"I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." --Curtis Sittenfeld
An extraordinary new novel of art, love, and ambition from Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of Euphoria
Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria , Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.
Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.
Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.
Author Notes
Lily King is an award-winning American novelist. She was born in 1963 and grew up in Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and Creative Writing at several universities and high schools in the States and abroad.
King's first novel, The Pleasing Hour was published in 1999, and was followed by The English Teacher and Father of the Rain. Her latest work, Euphoria, won the inaugural Kirkus Award for Fiction 2014, the New England Book Award for Fiction 2014 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
King's, elegant, droll follow-up to Euphoria traces an aspiring novelist's effort to find herself after turning 30 and losing her mother. After a series of lovers and moves, Casey Peabody ends up alone in Boston, Mass., with nothing to hold onto. Her commitment to writing each morning keeps her at a dead-end waitressing job that barely covers her grungy rented room and the minimum payments for the massive debt she incurred for her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Her devastating grief for her mother, whose unexplained death occurred while vacationing abroad, can only be assuaged, she feels, by finishing the novel she's been working on for six years ("I don't write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse"). She begins dating the successful writer Oscar Kolton, as well as one of his students, and finds new inspiration in the romances ("Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy"). Facing the impending loss of her apartment, she fears that living with one of her lovers would expose her "blighted" dysfunction. While King's resolutions of Casey's financial, emotional, and creative challenges don't feel uniformly convincing, the nimble, astute narration appeals. This meditation on the passing of youth is touching and ruefully funny. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
In John Singer Sargent's 19th-century portrait The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, three young girls in neat period dresses gaze blankly at the viewer, while a fourth turns away towards shadow, almost truculently reserved. There's a truculent reserve to 31-year-old Casey Kasem, the down-at-heel narrator of Lily King's new book. Casey is an aspiring writer and has been labouring over a novel for six years. She works at a restaurant and lives in a potting shed, grieving the death of her mother. She's lonely. But gazing at Sargent's portrait, she longs to "write something as good as right there, right where that belt cinches her pinafore". She sees what she could strive for and how hard it will be to accomplish. "There's a madness to beauty when you stumble on it like that," she thinks. Casey encounters the painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while on an uncertain date with an uncertain love interest. Pretty much everything is uncertain in Casey's life. Her housing situation is precarious and her waitressing job is insecure. She is burdened by debts so heavy that at times she can barely breathe, and her sketchy health insurance is about to be rescinded precisely at the moment she needs it. The one thing Casey knows with a piercing clarity is that she needs to write. Writers & Lovers is a puzzling and beautiful novel about writing and love. Its beauty lies in its precise observations. King notices the "sea" of crusted glasses and lipstick-smeared napkins that clutter a restaurant at the end of service, and the jostling community forged by its jaded staff as "blue daylight" cedes to dusk on a long shift. What's puzzling about the novel is how swiftly and intensely its quiet heroine captures your attention. Casey is a slight and elusive figure, getting soaked by rain as she cycles through lonely streets or shrinking from a bully at work. There's a stomach-churning pathos to the paucity of her resources and a dogged naivety in her commitment to writing in such meagre circumstances. King makes her struggles feel monumental, grindingly bleak. Yet somehow, Casey takes hold with a vice-like grip on your heart. Reading the book feels like waiting for clouds to break - a kind of gorgeous agony. But it's funny, too. King leavens Casey's misery with a wry, undaunted humour. Her friends belong to a writing group: Maria who can't bear reading Middlemarch and masturbates to get through it, and Muriel whose ankles "prickle" when she reads things that she likes. Muriel tries to matchmake Casey with George, who confesses to having written very little of his novel, "a sort of art heist [set] in the Golden Horde in 1389". Casey wisely decides: "I can't go out with a guy who's written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious." Instead, she starts dating two different men: Oscar, an older and successful writer, recently widowed with two young children, and Silas, who kisses her on a footbridge and periodically disappears in a depressed funk. The romances are charming and believable. And King writes children with a palpable tenderness. When Casey stays overnight with Oscar's scapegrace sons, they clamber into her bed for a cuddle and she feels "small hot feet against my shins". Most of all, King writes writers with a rare acuity. She skewers the entitlement of male novelists who "believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny". If the struggles of male genius have too often been the subject of literary writing, there's dignity and grace in how King honours Casey's ambitions here. Her obnoxious landlord mocks her. "I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say," he observes. But, Casey writes, not "because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse." I can't remember when I last read a sentence as simply true as that. King has a pleasing habit of describing in detail the writers that Casey loves best. William Styron's memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, has, she explains, the "stark lucidity of someone trying to tell you the truest thing they know". In these intimate moments, it's hard not to feel that King, too, is telling us the truest things she knows. "Tough, making a living in the arts," a kind stranger later observes to Casey. "But it's worth a shot." Is it really? The writer's life is a hard wager with which to keep faith. King complicates Writers & Lovers with the realities of student debt, housing and healthcare. Casey lives in the real world: it is brutal and she is unbearably brittle in it. Perhaps that's why King opts for an ending that grants Casey a kind of poetic justice. It's the one part of the book that doesn't ring true, but it's everything you could want for a heroine you'll cherish.
Kirkus Review
A Boston-area waitress manages debt, grief, medical troubles, and romantic complications as she finishes her novel."There are so many things I can't think about in order to write in the morning," Casey explains at the opening of King's (Euphoria, 2014, etc.) latest. The top three are her mother's recent death, her crushing student loans, and the married poet she recently had a steaming-hot affair with at a writer's colony. But having seen all but one of her writer friends give up on the dream, 31-year-old Casey is determined to stick it out. After those morning hours at her desk in her teensy garage apartment, she rides her banana bike to work at a restaurant in Harvard Squarea setting the author evokes in delicious detail, recalling Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter, though with a lighter touch. Casey has no sooner resolved to forget the infidel poet than a few more writers show up on her romantic radar. She rejects a guy at a party who reveals he's only written 11 1/2 pages in three years"That kind of thing is contagious"to find herself torn between a widowed novelist with two young sons and a guy with an irresistible broken tooth from the novelist's workshop. Casey was one of the top two golfers in the country when she was 14, and the mystery of why she gave up the sport altogether is entangled with the mystery of her estrangement from her father, the latter theme familiar from King's earlier work. In fact, with its young protagonist, its love triangle, and its focus on literary ambition, this charmingly written coming-of-age story would be an impressive debut novel. But after the originality and impact of Euphoria, it might feel a bit slight.Read this for insights about writing, about losing one's mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult four-top. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Grieving her mother's recent death, newly heartbroken, and shouldering crushing student debt, Casey lives in her brother's annoying friend's moldy Boston coach house, working on her novel in the mornings and waitressing at a swanky Cambridge restaurant at seemingly all other hours. A book-release party introduces two points of the love triangle Casey becomes entangled in: novelist Oscar, and one of his workshop students, Silas. Widowed, Oscar approaches Casey with a mix of awe and apprehension, and Casey falls easily into his life with his two young sons. Silas, meanwhile, intrigues with his humor, chipped tooth, and leather jacket, but hits the road just when he shouldn't. The romance will draw readers in, but Casey's journey as a writer, alone, is the book's strongest magnet. Despite being reminded of the foolhardy notion that women writers could have anything to say at all, she finishes a draft and isn't prepared for what this unleashes. With deep and sensationally wrought feeling Casey feels her anxiety as swarming bees, and as if she ""swallowed"" her dead mother King (Euphoria, 2014) leaves no barrier between readers and smart, genuine, cynical, and funny Casey. A closely observed tale of finding oneself, and one's voice, while working through grief.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2020 Booklist
Library Journal Review
King, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Euphoria, delves into what is frequently first-novel territory but with the skill and assurance of a seasoned pro. As the title suggests, the narrative follows Casey, a 31-year-old writer living in Boston, who is attempting to complete her first novel while debating between two potential romantic partners, both of whom are also writers. Successful author Oscar is widowed with two sons, while Silas is a quirky aspirant with whom Casey shares a strong sexual charge. A stressful day job as a server at a high-end restaurant, a recent heartbreak, health and financial concerns, and grief over her mother's recent death all add to Casey's dilemma over whether to choose the more stable and established Oscar or the seemingly less reliable Silas. With the novel set in the 1990s, missed and unanswered phone calls drive the plot in ways that wouldn't be possible in today's world. VERDICT While never minimizing the seriousness of Casey's personal problems, the book is also funny and romantic and hard to put down, full of well-observed details of restaurant culture and writer's workshops. It's hard to imagine a reader who wouldn't root for Casey. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/19.].--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
