![]() The book’s sections depict an older woman recounting navigating marriage while vacationing in Italy a graduate student sharing a cautionary tale about a predatory man in Ann Arbor, Michigan two friends discussing one’s affair and inevitable breakup. “I was interested in exploring bad desire-desires that one may not want to have but are there anyway-and trying to explore what possibly could be the origin of these desires and what does it mean to be possessed of a desire that you know is yours but you also want to reject and that you recognize as somehow alien to you or somehow harmful to you.” ![]() It’s a structural technique that Popkey credits to author Rachel Cusk, deployed between the unnamed narrator and other women discussing their lives, relationships, sexuality, anger, and, most notably, desires. ![]() The result was Topics of Conversation, out January 7, which, as the title suggests, is carried by discussions. “There was a certain amount of anger about the ways in which I had unconsciously been formed by cultural products that were made by someone whose desires were to harm women or humiliate women or get something from get something from women, no matter their interests in giving that thing up,” she says. So her environment seeped into her work, Popkey says, as she found inspiration in “the ongoing series of revelations in which men in the workplace abused their power in order to sexually harass, sexually assault, and rape women who had less power than they did.” Specifically, it was Harvey Weinstein-the film producer who allegedly assaulted more than a dozen women and is slated to stand trial in early 2020-and Popkey’s realization of how much influence he’d exerted on her own life from afar. It was 2017, on the cusp of the #MeToo era, and focusing on writing felt selfish, says the author, who was earning her MFA at Washington University at the time. Miranda Popkey was angry when she began writing Topics of Conversation.
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