“It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”
Casey Peabody has just lost her mother. Despite her MFA in creative writing, she is trapped under unfathomable debt, and her only stable work is at a fine-dining restaurant in Harvard Square. The former potting shed she rents from her brother’s best friend reeks of mold and old leaves, and within its narrow four walls, she has been trying to finish the novel she started six years ago.
Published in 2020, Writers & Lovers by Lily King is a literary story that encapsulates the craft of writing beneath the burden of ambition, through the lens of a woman who has finished her academic career only to be seized by debt, poverty, and the sudden, tragic death of her mother. Her platonic relationships are few and far between, her romantic entanglements gutting and messy, but it’s a coming-of-age story for the late bloomer, when adulthood has tricked you into believing success is awarded after academic achievement. Casey has nothing to show for her expertise, but the novel is a journey toward finding her calling and what the reader can only hope is the rest of her life.
“All problems with writing and performing come from fear,” writes King. “Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It’s all fear. If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.”
The novel ebbs and flows with stagnancy and movement, mirroring Casey’s grief and her attempts to heal, as well as her inability to finish her novel. While the book takes place in 1997 when social media, pandemics, and cell phones were non-existent or at least uncommon, the human condition has changed very little in almost 20 years. King captures this with awe-striking passages about writing and growing old with a young mindset. Through Casey’s struggles, King shares her insight about how writers deconstruct the human condition through their craft, of what being human entails, and that through the process of carving away at her own hopelessness, Casey is able to finish her novel and start to process the failures that pile up around her.
Casey’s romantic conflicts between her two contrasting suitors serve as a major plot point, and whom the reader might root for depends on what they value most. Caught between a capricious poet who’s undecided in what he wants, and an older, successful author who’s recently widowed and parenting two little boys alone, Casey’s pattern of unfulfilled relationships carefully hints at how she’ll decide. Men in the novel have a tendency to fall into varying degrees of perversion, and later in the novel, it’s revealed that Casey ended all contact with her father after discovering that he had drilled holes in his high school office that allowed him to spy on teenage girls while they changed in their locker room. King carefully replicates these disturbing dynamics between authoritative men and vulnerable women in different areas of Casey’s life, but as she starts to map them, her tolerance for these men ultimately disappears.
After finishing a book, the hangover that consumes me is usually one of dread or unfulfillment or — rarely — satisfaction. Toward the end of the book, Casey describes the satisfaction I felt best as, “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.”
This book feels different from anything that I’ve read in years, in that the ending allows the reader to hope that Casey has found stable ground, and that the book is ending because she has finished persevering through her rock bottom and can now have peace. Its charm is so comforting that after finishing the last page, I went back to the beginning to start again, hunt for the clues I missed before, and circle the passages I want to keep forever. Should you pick it up, I recommend pestering someone to read it alongside you, to share in the grief and awakening that King will draw out.
