Source of book: Audiobook from the library
This book was my traveling choice for a recent trip to stay at a friend’s condo in the mountains, hike, and play string quartets. It was a great trip in all regards.
Every year, my wife and I have a date night where we sip cocktails at our local tiki bar and go through the NPR book list together. We each make notes of what we want to add to our reading list, and talk about what we think is interesting and not interesting. It’s a great tradition.
This book was one of the ones that I put on my list. I also put it on my Libby watch list, and it happened to be available.
In thinking about how to write about this book, I realized that there was no good way to avoid spoilers, because pretty much everything I wanted to talk about was tied up with major plot developments.
So, my solution here is going to be to give a basic “back cover” kind of overview about what the book is about, and then give a spoiler warning. If you want to be surprised by the book, stop there. If you have read the book, don’t want to read it, or don’t care about spoilers, then read on.
So, the summary:
This is a lesbian coming-of-age story set in 1990s Ireland. (Where the author grew up, basically, as a queer girl.) This is the time when homosexuality was finally decriminalized in that country, but social mores were still very much in flux. Older generations and rural communities retained strong homophobia long after the cities and younger people changed.
The book is written in the first person, with 17 year old Lucy as the narrator. It is also written entirely in present tense, which usually annoys me, but wasn’t terrible in this case. I can’t decide if the way it contributes to the “in the moment” feel of the book makes the book better than a more traditional approach would have been. Maybe. In any case, the writing is good, so it at least avoids that feeling of an amateur author trying to be cute and trendy.
The book is also very much a teenage romance. The emotions are way too big, and the crushes bordering on obsession. They are definitely not healthy, in an adult way. I’ll talk a bit more about that, but with spoilers.
The first third of the book feels really slow, and like nothing happens. In fact, just my own feeling is that the book really should have been shortened a good bit. Not that it is particularly long. Just that certain parts drag and seem repetitive.
On the other hand, man does the book draw you in if you can get past that first third. Things then really start to happen, and the whole thing feels like a car crash you can see coming but can’t prevent.
I also liked that a certain amount of what is said has to be said through letters. And the way that the book brings the Irish countryside of the modern era to life. The feeling of a world in transition is palpable.
The basic setup is that Lucy is growing up in a large farm family, essentially in poverty. She has a group of female friends she hangs with. She is expected by everyone - and I mean everyone - to marry Martin, the sweet, kind boy on the next farm. They are, after all, best friends, and get along so well.
The problem is, Lucy realizes she likes girls, not boys. And she is obsessed with Susannah, one of the girls in her class. Susannah is everything Lucy is not: rich and in line to inherit when she comes of age, academically gifted, and most of all, confident in herself. At least on the outside. And Susannah loves her back and wants to be with her.
Lucy is thus faced with an impossible choice: does she do the conventional thing and marry Martin, thus keeping her family and friends and (almost) everyone she knows happy? Or does she follow her heart and be with Susannah, thus losing her family and friends?
At this point, I will give my spoiler warning. If you don’t want to have spoilers, stop here, get the book, and come back to read the rest.
***
Okay, here we go. Something about this book really struck a chord with me, to the point where I actually remembered a number of lines fairly close to word for word, and jotted them down when I got home.
It wasn’t just that I enjoy queer romances - I do! I’m a cishet guy, but I enjoy stories about love between women and between men - love is love. Also, though, my experience is that women write better sex scenes than men, and that gay people write better sex scenes than heterosexual people. Anyway, poke around a bit on my index of books by queer authors, and you will find romances old and new.
The reason this book affected me as much as it did is that there is a lot in here that mirrors my own experience of being rejected by my parents.
As I said, I am not gay, although that obviously would have been a major reason that my parents would have rejected me. I don’t want to sound like I am comparing my own experience entirely with the far more difficult one of being a sexual minority in a bigoted society. That’s a whole other level of trauma.
But there are some connecting realities. My parents’ rejection of me has everything to do with what I call the Gospel of Genitals™. The idea is that genitals are destiny. One’s genital configuration determines one’s life.
Thus, being gay is sinful because it is doing something that someone with your genital configuration is not permitted to do.
This applies to so much more than sexual activity, however. Vagina people are to be subservient to penis people. They are to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labor, not economic activity. They are to dress to please men…but not too much.
Men, too, of course have expectations about their roles, but these are not enforced as heavily as those on women and LGBTQ people.
It’s more than just genitals, though, because it is a whole cultural landscape. For Lucy, her destiny as others saw it was to marry Martin, become a farm wife, have a bunch of kids, go to mass, and fulfill a certain kind of life that never appealed to her.
For my wife, my parents expected something very similar, minus the farming. In other words, and even more narrow and restricted kind of life.
In addition, this is all tied up with politics here in the United States. To be my parents’ kind of Christian, you have to support Republican politics. And if you point out that many of them are deeply harmful to other humans, you find yourself cut off, like I did.
Ultimately, I was not the child they wanted. I was a divergent thinker with an active bullshit detector. I questioned everything, including their politics and theology, and refused to simply affirm their beliefs and choices. I wouldn’t and indeed couldn’t be a clone of them when it came to religion, culture, and politics.
All this to say that my experience with my parents felt a lot like what Lucy experiences. Neither of us could be ourselves. We had to lie and sneak and hide who we really were. Love was entirely conditional, and easily lost.
Okay, so here come the spoilers.
In the book, Lucy and Susannah finally get together about a third of the way through the book. The romance isn’t particularly healthy, at least on Lucy’s part. She is clearly over-obsessed, and yet also terrified of being found out. Susannah has a troubled relationship with her mother already, and her father left the family for another woman years ago - but at least he is progressive, so he is the one person who doesn’t freakout about having a lesbian daughter.
In an interview, the author noted that while she writes queer characters, and obviously has to include all the cultural and familial crap they experience, she goes out of her way to write stories where the queer characters create or at least contribute to their own problems. And Lucy sure does.
As she gradually realizes as the book goes on, she isn’t a particularly good person. She uses people. She strings them along. She lies and manipulates to protect herself. And, unsurprisingly, she ends up hurting people.
The romance can’t last, because Susannah wants to go public, and Lucy refuses. Before this can, by itself, ruin things, catastrophe strikes: Lucy’s mom discovers them in flagrante and freaks out. She punishes Lucy by essentially giving her the silent treatment.
At that age, Lucy simply cannot just put up with this, so she decides to win her parents back. And the only way she knows to do that is to pretend she loves Martin.
This is the big mistake, because as besotted as Lucy is with Susannah, Martin is equally besotted with her. She is his dream girl, and he wants nothing more than to be with her forever.
Thus, Lucy sets poor Martin up for heartbreak, in order to save her own skin.
When she finishes high school, college is not an option due to finances. Instead, she is given a horrible choice. Susannah has come into her money, and asks Lucy to run away with her. Lucy is unwilling at that point to surrender her fantasy of having a relationship with her parents, so she declines, breaking Susannah’s heart.
Susannah finally tells her that if she wants to go to the city, she is going to have to do it alone. That Susannah deserves better than what Lucy is willing to give her. And she is completely correct about this.
Her parents, on the other hand, start tearing her room apart, getting rid of her things. She has one choice only according to them: go with Martin to the city. Interestingly, they seem to be fine with her shacking up with Martin.
As her mom says:
“You might as well go with Martin, because there’s nothing left for you here.”
So she does. But there in the city, she realizes that she is deeply unhappy. She tries so hard to love Martin, and to make him happy, but it is all wrong.
“I didn’t hate having sex with Martin, but I didn’t like it either.”
She ends up doing two things to cope, neither of which is healthy. First, she sends a letter to Susannah, restarting a kind of dysfunctional long distance relationship. Second, she starts sleeping with a lesbian coworker, who has feelings for her. Yep, this is not good.
At the end, everything goes to absolute shit.
Susannah finally decides she cannot continue to have a relationship with Lucy. In one of the most heartrending lines, she admits that the two of them had an intense and loving relationship that year, but now all she remembers is crying.
Oof.
In the meantime, Martin has gone back home for Christmas, and the girls who used to be Lucy’s friends brutally tease him that Lucy was “riding Susannah O’Shea all that year.” He doesn’t believe them until he discovers Lucy’s passionate correspondence with Susannah, and his world comes undone.
He realizes in retrospect that he should have seen the signs all those years that Lucy was lesbian and didn’t feel the same way about him as he did for her.
The discovery scene is wonderful and heartrending. Lucy is crushed and repentant that she has hurt her best friend. The best line:
“I wish everything was different. I wish I was different.”
Martin’s response is so in line with his character:
“I don’t wish you were different, because then you wouldn’t be my Lucy.”
Lucy is sure in the moment that he will be angry at her later, that he will hate her, and that they will never see each other again. But this is her response to every fight with everyone else. She is of that age and personality where everything is a catastrophe.
But I suspect that Martin will remain her friend, and return to some sort of a relationship with her later. He isn’t a bigot, and they work really well as friends. Perhaps I myself can understand this because if, for some reason, my wife and I hadn’t been compatible as spouses, I would still want to be friends.
You have to feel terrible for Martin, though. The love of his life doesn’t reciprocate. He will live his life in the small town, farming his family farm. Eventually, perhaps, the scandal will die down and be forgotten. But for now, he will live with the infamy of being cuckolded. And he did nothing to deserve it. Sure, he missed the signs. But he was also freaking eighteen! One hopes for healing for him, and eventually a woman that adores him for the good man he is.
The book also ends with the possibility that Lucy and Susannah will get to be together, and find the basis for a healthier relationship now that they have grown up. One hopes so for both their sake. Sure, Lucy is immature and has made a hash of things, but she has the potential of growth as she becomes an adult. Already, but the end of the book, she has realized a lot of important things about herself, and about relationships.
And this leads to the last thing I want to discuss. Parents.
I do not think that Lucy will ever have a relationship with her parents again.
This is where I am at myself. I can’t remember if a character says it, or if Lucy just realizes it, but this one line just gutted me. I am not sure if I have the wording correctly, because it was several days before I could write it down, but it was substantially this:
The love of a parent is the most fragile because it is the most easily withdrawn.
Damn.
And it is true with my parents, at least. I hope and pray to god, the universe, and whatever else may be out there that it isn’t true for me with my own kids. GOD I hope not. I do not want to have such fragile and conditional love for the incredible people my children are.
Near the end of the book, a minor character, Evelyn, a city neighbor of Martin and Lucy, who has become Lucy’s confidant, says this about Lucy’s fear of losing her family and her female friends from childhood:
“If you would lose them for this, then you never had them.”
That is exactly right. I never had my parents. They never cared for me that way. If they did, they wouldn’t have thrown me away so easily, and for such stupid stuff. Stuff like whether I could listen to music in genres created by black people. Stuff like whether I believed in science or superstition. And especially my politics.
Ultimately, I couldn’t be myself and have a relationship with them, because who I was was not acceptable to them. It never was. All our fights through my teen years can be boiled down to that. I would not conform. I would not shut up. I would not live my life to their specifications. And since I wouldn’t do that, I was worthless to them.
Like Lucy, I wasted far too much of my life trying to retain a relationship with my parents. And ultimately, the effort failed. Even though I sacrificed so much to try to win their love. I gave up my chance at normal college. I gave up my chance to choose my own career. And, like Lucy, some of that was unavoidable. I didn’t have resources any more than she did to just leave home at 18 without any means of support.
So I did what I had to do. I hid myself. I went along. I tried, like Lucy, to make myself acceptable to them. I’m sad that it came to that, but this is one reason the book got to me. I recognize that feeling that there is no choice but to hide who you are to survive.
More embarrassing is that I actually offered to give my then-girlfriend up if they disapproved. I am grateful my dad didn’t take me up on that, but I am still horrified that I even offered. The thought that I might have thrown her away for parents who would never accept me is a great shame to me even now, after 25 years of marriage to my best friend.
As LGBTQ people have understood since forever, ideology will eventually collide with reality. For them, and for me, we eventually had to stand up and say “your ideology does not match my lived reality.” Alas, when ideology has become your identity, as it has for my parents, you cannot accept any reality that doesn’t match. And that usually means getting rid of the people whose existence causes you cognitive dissonance.
I have seen this in so many families where a child has come out. It goes one of two ways. Either the parents realize that their ideology and theology are untenable, or they double down on their beliefs and destroy their relationship with their child. I have a cousin who is dead of suicide because their parents chose the latter.
In the case of Lucy as well, her mother made it clear that she would rather have a dead child than a gay one. Some children will take that deadly seriously.
So yes, this book got to me a bit, particularly at the end.
Like Lucy, a combination of maturity and circumstances forcing my hand, I eventually came to the realization that I would inevitably lose my parents. And that I should determine no matter what, that I would have to refuse to lose myself and those who truly loved me.
Sadly and perhaps ironically, it would turn out to be my acceptance and affirmation of LGBTQ people that would be what convinced my mother that I was not “walking in truth” and therefore going to hell. Which, in my case, would mean that in order to please her, I would have to reject my own children. And you can guess who I would choose every single time.
Jane Austen perhaps anticipated this state of affairs, in Pride and Prejudice:
“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. -- Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.''
This is why I am pretty sure that, while Lucy might be able to rebuild her relationship with Susannah, and probably will remain friends with Martin, I do not see the relationship with her mother in particular ever coming back. There are lines that cannot be crossed, and certain rejections that cannot be repaired.
Once a parent makes clear that their love is conditional like that, I’m not sure how you can repair that betrayal.
***
I wanted to end this post on a lighter note, sort of at least. One of the other things about this book that moved me was the question of first loves and broken hearts. And also teenage love.
I never had a teenage romance.
I wasn’t allowed to. Not allowed to date. Not allowed to risk my heart until I was ready to marry, and only then in a relationship that was expressly headed to marriage.
In addition to that, my sister did her best to drive away any female that was interested in me or my brother, even as friends. (I found out about a lot of this years later, reconnecting with women that I knew from that era.)
I didn’t go on my first date until the age of 23. I have only ever dated my wife. We got married relatively young - especially her.
So, in a very real way, she was my first love, my first great romance. I have no regrets about that, and do not wish I had had other romantic and sexual experiences. I found a good one the first time.
For this reason, though, I do not entirely understand the experience of obsessive teenaged love.
What I do understand is that you never get over your first real love. It stays with you all your life. After 25 years of marriage, I would be wrecked if my wife left. But I would have been after 1 year as well.
Perhaps that is why I root for first loves, even though I know that for many people, first relationships don’t work out - and indeed shouldn’t.
So yes, I am rooting for these two imaginary girls to recapture their love as adults. Does it happen? The book doesn’t say. So I will just have to hope.
Sunburn is worth checking out. It’s not a perfect book, and it is emotionally exhausting at times, but it captures the cultural dynamics of being an outsider in one’s own family and village, as well as the struggles of being young and inexperienced and unsure of how to build a future.
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