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In Lily King’s fifth novel, she takes up the task of writing about the experience of writing a novel. The protagonist of Writers and Lovers, thirty-one-year-old Casey Peabody works as a waitress at an upscale restaurant outside of Boston, spending her time off working on her novel. Casey is at a personal crossroads—her mother having died suddenly, and her love affair having ended painfully—when she finds herself at the center of a love triangle. On one hand is Oscar Kolton, a celebrated forty-five-year-old novelist who recently became a single father of two young sons after the death of his young wife. On the other hand is Silas, a young writer who Casey meets at Oscar’s book signing. Casey begins dating the two men, torn between the proximity to privilege that Oscar represents, and the more grounded sincerity that Silas represents. Meanwhile, Casey struggles to work on her novel in her state of grief and the economic anxiety produced by her mountain of debt.
The novel features multiple characters that fall under the familiar archetype of the Celebrated Male Writer. From Casey’s ex, Luke, the self-involved poet who disguised his emotional immaturity as spontaneity, to Oscar and Silas, two sides of the love triangle she finds herself in. Casey has a healthy fear of these egotistical artists, who “wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.” In a scene that takes place before one of Oscar’s public readings, she describes him having a brief fit about how a female contemporary of his hosted a much larger audience at her reading, lamenting how he should have larger crowds at his readings at his age. She remarks to herself, “Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule…I understand its how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman that ever told me that greatness was her destiny.”
It is thus important that the most valuable feedback on Casey’s novel comes from Muriel, a female friend, and Jennifer, a female literary agent’s assistant. Casey’s novel is almost entirely shaped by the hands of women, inspired by her mother, and then coaxed into final form by these two female colleagues, and it seems important to King that Casey’s professional accomplishments lie centrally in the female sphere. The male writers in her life do not even look at her novel, Oscar never asked to, and thus it exists outside of the oppressive male gaze. While the romantic drama in her life certainly sparked passions in Casey that allowed her to write more freely, Casey is the clearly the writer and the men are the lovers.
King’s novel is a beautiful endorsement for the validity of artistic creation as a central component of a full life. Casey describes friends who merely treated writing as a hobby, moving on to become lawyers and bankers. But Casey is different, when her landlord remarks, “I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say,” Casey thinks to herself, “I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.” Throughout the novel, Casey struggles to come to terms with her grief surrounding her mother’s sudden death, her father’s betrayal and abandonment, her struggles with poverty and debt, amidst other concerns, all the while finding refuge in her writing. Her mounting anxiety surrounding these issues provokes a great deal of physical stress for Casey, who can’t seem to find a way to release the worry trapped in her body.
But near the conclusion, Casey remarks, “what I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful”. King asserts the power of creativity and commitment to one’s art as a life-saving practice, and I would argue that implicit in this belief is that life-saving energy extends to those who experience the art. This novel is an absolute joy to read, one that delights in the details of the everyday, and proves its thesis that beauty and transcendence will find us anywhere.