Synopses & Reviews
A compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction, perfect for fans of Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill.
"Shrewd and sensual, Popkey's debut carries the scintillating charge of a long-overdue girls' night. --O, The Oprah Magazine
A Best Book of the Year by TIME, Esquire, Real Simple, Marie Claire, Glamor, Bustle, and more
Composed almost exclusively of conversations between women--the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves--Topics of Conversation careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. In exchanges about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage, Popkey touches upon desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, and guilt. Edgy, wry, and written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism, this novel introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist.
Review
“Lyrical…. Smart and raw.” The Washington Post
Review
“Sally Rooney-esque…. Popkey’s sentences careen breathlessly as her halting, staccato prose mirrors the ‘churning’ within the narrator’s mind…. A shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling these amorphous notions of pain, desire and control.” The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
MIRANDA POPKEY was born in Santa Cruz, California in 1987. She graduated with a BA in Humanities from Yale in 2009 and with an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018. She has written for, among other outlets, The New Republic, The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, the Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Awl, GQ, and New York magazine’s The Cut.