#POPKEY STOPPED WORKING FULL#

Each conversation is given its own chapter, labeled with the setting and the year it took place, and each represents a defining point in the storyline of the unnamed narrator’s adult life – in the formation of her identity, or at least her self-image. It’s a novel told in ten conversations over seventeen years. Miranda Popkey’s debut, Topics of Conversation, is almost a novelisation of the Didion quote, with all its intended implications of corruption and compromise: the dirty side of narrativisation. The word ‘stories’ has a mushy, nostalgic feel, as in, ‘Tell me a story, Daddy.’ What she means, though, is lies – or if not lies, manipulations: ‘We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’ The phantasmagoria of ‘images’ is reality – the narrative of language is the lie.

#POPKEY STOPPED WORKING FULL#

With Didion’s line – the opening sentence of The White Album – you need the full paragraph to understand that it’s contemptuous. But when you read the whole poem, it’s clear that it’s ironic – a joke about self-deception. Another is ‘I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ In isolation, the Frost line sounds sincere I’ve seen it printed on inspirational posters. ‘ We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ is one of those lines that is quoted so often out of context it has lost its original meaning. Miranda Popkey’s ‘Topics of Conversation’

Popkey stopped working