Articles Available Online

‘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 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 But when you read the whole poem, it’s clear that it’s ironic – a joke about self-deception With Didion’s line – the opening sentence of The White Album – you need the full paragraph to understand that it’s contemptuous 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   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 It’s a novel told in ten conversations over seventeen years 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 The novel begins in the year 2000, in coastal Italy, where she has gone on vacation with a wealthy college friend, Camila, and Camila’s family Camila’s parents cover the narrator’s expenses in exchange for her acting as nanny to Camila’s rowdy twin brothers   Artemisia, the mother, is beautiful and glamorous, and the narrator admires her for this as well as for her self-understanding: ‘She knew herself so well and I, at twenty-one, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my