Guest review by Anna Wilson: WRITERS AND LOVERS by Lily King

 

 'I needed to be reminded that the only constant in this life is change and that “I write [and read] because if I don’t, everything feels worse.”'

Anna Wilson has been a children’s book editor both in-house and freelance for twenty-five years. She has also been a published writer for twenty years. Anna has published 50 books for children and young teens including picture books, short stories, poems, non-fiction and fiction series. Her books have been chosen for World Book Day and been shortlisted for the Hull Libraries Award, the Lancashire Book of the Year Award and the ALCS Educational Writers’ Award. Anna’s recent young fiction series Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire is published by Stripes. Her adult memoir A Place for Everything: my mother, autism and me is published by HarperCollins.

Anna is a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and a creative writing tutor for City University, London, the London Lit Lab, the Arvon Foundation and the HarperCollins Author Academy.

This is the novel that got me out of Lockdown Reader’s Block. I know now that I wasn’t alone in not being able to focus on writing or reading last spring, but at the time I didn’t know what had happened to my brain and felt bereft. Then a neighbour lent me this book and I immediately felt less panicked. The main character, Casey, is not experiencing living through a pandemic, but she is grieving the sudden loss of her mother and is also coping with a health scare of her own. She has been trying to write a novel for six years, while battling a huge amount of debt, living in a grim, over-priced potting shed and working arduous, under-paid shifts in a café. So far, so depressing, you might think! But the book is so sharply observed, and so real that I couldn’t help but be swept along by it.

It is also witty and warm. I found myself all but shouting, “yes!” at Casey’s comments on the writing life, as well as on her observation of (some) male writers who seem to think “they should already be famous and believed that greatness was their destiny.” The book is full of such quotable observations, my favourite being that Casey feels she “can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and a half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.” She comes up time and again against men who doubt her ability to write a novel that anyone else would want to read. Even her landlord says, “I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.” This reader felt her outrage keenly, and was cheering her on from the side-lines when she finally hit flow state and everything outside her writing dissolved: “There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.”

Casey is juggling two lovers while racing to the finish with her novel, both of whom are also writers. One, Oscar, is older and much more successful than she. He is the sort of man she feels she should be with: he is caring and protective of her and has two gorgeous young sons with whom Casey admits to falling more in love than with Oscar. Her other lover is Silas – less of a catch, but infinitely sexier and more of a distraction. The way King writes about the dilemmas of falling for the “wrong” man is funny and convincing.

There is no clear-cut ending to this novel, which felt right given the realism of its setting, characterisation and style. There is more a sense that life goes on, just as writing and loving do, and that sometimes it “goes right after a long time of things going wrong”. For this reason alone, the book arrived in my hands at the right time. I needed to be reminded that the only constant in this life is change and that “I write [and read] because if I don’t, everything feels worse.”

Writers and Lovers is published by Picador.

See also Michèle Roberts' Negative Capability, reviewed by Jill Dawson.

and Anna's review of Unsheltered  by Barbara Kingsolver.