Topics of Conversation

Author(s): Miranda Popkey

Novel | Fiction Reductions

What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us? Miranda Popkey's remarkable debut novel follows one woman as she makes her way through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation, each new episode narrated through the conversations she has with other women: in private with friends, at late-night parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, intimacy, cynicism and desire. From the coast of the Adriatic to sun-soaked California, Topics of Conversation maps out one woman's life through the stories of the women around her. Full of the uncertainty of the present and the instability of the past, sizzling with enigmatic desire, it is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers.

"A brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction." —Ben Marcus


"An intimate evisceration of our narrow imaginings of female sexuality, a brilliantly structured character study and a book that repeatedly asks how women can fully trust their own desires when they've grown up steeped in the wrong stories." —Karen Russell


A sustained, Sally Rooney-esque brooding on our simultaneous but conflicting yearnings for autonomy and "being a vessel for the desire of others' ... As Rachel Cusk's narrator observes in Transit, "The moments when life could be observed in a meaningful arrangement were rare." Popkey's narrator traverses a series of inflection points over the course of seventeen years. She hopes to excavate some sort of arc, a scaffolding of her inner thoughts, from these discursive flashes.' * The New York Times *


Author Biography: 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, New Republic, the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog, Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Awl, GQ.com and The Cut.

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Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781788164047
  • : Serpent's Tail Limited
  • : Serpent's Tail Limited
  • : 0.395
  • : September 2019
  • : ---length:- '21.6'width:- '13.5'units:- Centimeters
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Miranda Popkey
  • : Hardback
  • : 1
  • : English
  • : 240