I might not have picked this book up if it weren’t for the fact that Georgia Toews will be one of the featured authors at my local Writers Festival this summer. I’m glad I did though because I found this novel to be a fresh and interesting voice in contemporary fiction. There were definite hints of Sally Rooney here, with a flavour that felt like something different from many of the books about young adults I’ve read recently.
Virginia is 23-years-old, a stand-up comic living and working in Toronto but trying to get her green card so she can move to Los Angeles. She lives with her best friend since high school, Haley, and find herself increasingly maneuvering her life around Haley’s all-consuming depression. Virginia is doing okay – bi-weekly dinners with her stepdad, Dale, and frequent comedy acts in clubs around the city. But life at home with Haley is becoming more and more fraught with tension and then a date with another comedian turns out to be a terrible encounter and Virginia doesn’t know if she can turn her life into comedy or how to move forward.
I can’t think of another book I’ve read where the protagonist is the one dealing with someone else’s overwhelming depression. I can think of plenty of books where the main character is the one deeply depressed and you wonder how their friends manage it or keep showing up. But here we have what I felt was a pretty realistic depiction of trying to maintain a relationship with someone who is depressed for no particular reason. Haley alludes to her trauma but Virginia has known her for long enough to know that nothing really that traumatic has happened to her best friend. And Virginia especially knows this because when they were teenagers, Virginia’s mom got sick and then died and this is something that Virginia is still working out. It’s been years and she is increasingly angry and confused by the fact that she is still so sad. But Haley’s clinical depression – something Virginia knows she can’t control but is frustrated that Haley won’t control – is the overwhelming emotion in their apartment and doesn’t leave enough space for Virginia’s grief over her mother or her hurt and confusion about what happens to her on her date.
Amidst this, her stepfather wants to sell the house she lived in with her mother and her father is getting remarried. It’s a lot for one person to carry and Virginia is trying to figure out if she can make a comedic bit out of it all. Haley is the person who offers continuity from her life with her mother into the life she is currently living.
Readers looking for neat solutions or illuminating conversations won’t find them here. Over and over, Haley and Virginia have conversations that are frustratingly real, neither of them quite saying what they want to. They fight, they fall back into private jokes and histories, they argue and know just how to hurt one another. It’s almost painfully realistic as to what it looks like to move through the end of a friendship. Virginia is trying so hard to support Haley without understanding really what Haley is feeling and nothing anyone can do will change what Haley is going through. They are both good characters and they are both awful in equal turns.
The part I enjoyed less about this novel were the stand-up comedy bits. We get chunks of Virginia’s comic routine, as well as the other comedians she works and interacts with and, well, I just didn’t think they were that funny. I’ll be the first to admit though that my interactions with stand-up comedy are extremely minimal and I don’t in general enjoy the crude type of humour all of the comics in the book seem to employ. So your mileage may vary but I found I couldn’t tell if Virginia was supposed to be successful at what she does or not. She seems to be getting a decent amount of gigs, though not all of them, and I thought she was much funnier in her thoughts than she was on stage.
Overall though, I did enjoy this novel and I would recommend it to readers looking for something slightly different than another “messy woman” book.
Karissa Reads Books 