Popkey not working series#

These are things I had been thinking about for probably fifteen years, but I did write it quite quickly. Start to finish on the first draft was maybe seven months.

Popkey: As I said, I wrote it in a bit of a rush. What was your research process for writing such a well-informed novel about this complicated topic? Your novel doesn’t take a fixed stance, or if it does, it allows for each situation to be individual in its complexities.

Rumpus: Something that ran through my mind while reading your novel was the concept of morality in sexual harassment cases or relationships with strong power dynamics. And for whatever reason, around this time, I was able to tap into a narrative voice, the voice of my narrator in the novel, which was able to communicate anger. And it seemed that the conversations that I had been having with myself or with friends, those conversations were becoming really public. I don’t know exactly why but it seemed to open up a space for conversations about power dynamics. And then, of course, toward the end of 2017, that was when the Harvey Weinstein allegations of sexual assault and rape and sexual harassment started coming out. I really wanted to put anger in these stories I had been feeling a lot of anger, and for some reason it just wasn’t coming through for my readers. They were very cold and guarded and remote. The other thing is that for the stories I had been writing in my first year, I had been getting some great, generous feedback, but the thing that kept coming up was that there wasn’t a ton of emotion in my stories. There were a couple things that coincided and contributed to shaping the novel.įirst of all, I’ve been trying for a long time to write about a certain kind of relationship that I have experienced, that I think a lot of women have experienced, where there is a power imbalance that at first seems appealing and then later, perhaps in retrospect, perhaps later in the relationship while it is still occurring, ends up feeling uncomfortable or something other than desirable. I wrote it in a bit of a rush, late summer and fall and then into winter of 20. Miranda Popkey: I really didn’t write any of this until the summer between my first and second year of my MFA there’s some stuff that I salvaged from my first year, which ended up in a very different form in the novel itself. The Rumpus: What was the origin of Topics of Conversation?

I spoke recently with Popkey about the delicate nature of storytelling and the conversations, both public and private, about relationships that shaped her novel. The structure of the novel allows for the misinterpretations, the little white lies, and the emotional charge that make up our everyday intimate conversations and influence the way we see ourselves and one another. Through her prose, Popkey reminds the reader of the fluid nature of a person’s identity and how we futilely try to mold it into something fixed. The narrator, along with the characters that populate her life, weave their experiences into narratives, attempting to make sense of themselves as they share their stories with each other. It begins in the narrator’s twenty second year, when she shares an intimate scene with her friend’s mother, and ends in her late thirties, after she’s grappled with an array of relationships.

Popkey not working series#

Miranda Popkey’s debut novel Topics of Conversation, out next week from Knopf, explores the moral and emotional complexities of modern love and sex through a series of conversations between mothers and daughters, old friends, new friends, and strangers.