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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

‘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

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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fiction

November 2015

Wolves

Jeon Sungtae

TR. Sora Kim-Russell

fiction

November 2015

The Chief   The sound of the bell for the closing of the temple gate reaches my ears. I...

Art

May 2014

The Interzone and Dexter Dalwood

Sarah Hegenbart

Dexter Dalwood

Art

May 2014

‘Burroughs in Tangier’ (2005) has captivated me ever since its display in the 2010 Turner Prize Exhibition. The work...

poetry

May 2015

Europe

Kirill Medvedev

TR. Keith Gessen

poetry

May 2015

I’m riding the bus with a group of athletes from some provincial town they’re going to a competition in...

 

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