Source of book: Audiobook from the library
Fiona and Jane is one of the books I chose during one of my wife and my annual “craft cocktails and the NPR review list” dates. Yeah, we are book nerds.
This book is a bit different than your average novel. It is more like a collection of short stories involving the same characters, and in fact, several of the stories were published in magazines separately before being combined into this book. However, the stories are a lot more connected than in a typical short story collection, as they tell the story of a childhood friendship that lasts into middle age.
The book has a number of LGBTQ characters and plot points, but, from what I can tell, the author herself considers herself cishet. This is particularly interesting since the character that seems to be closest to a stand in for the author - Jane - is bisexual.
To be clear here, I have no problem with a straight author writing gay characters. They exist in real life, and for a white author to only write white people would be to deny the reality we live in. The same applies to LGBTQ characters - a book completely devoid of them would seem to be unrealistic in a certain way.
In this book, gay people both exist as a normal slice of life, and the complexities of existing as a gay person in a homophobic culture like our own form the basis of some of what happens in this book.
I also checked, and the author is clear that the book is not autobiographical. She says that literally nothing in this book happened to her or her friends. Instead, what she has drawn from her own life is the experience of being a Taiwanese immigrant growing up in Los Angeles.
The book is told from two different points of view. Jane’s chapters are told from her perspective, and in the first person. Fiona’s, in contrast, are told in the third person, although they are clearly from Fiona’s perspective. This creates a kind of distance, making the reader feel more intimate with Jane than with Fiona. I imagine this was an intentional choice, and it does create a unique feel to the way the stories unfold.
By the end of the book, I felt that Jane needed Fiona more than Fiona needed Jane, and that distance in the perspectives was one reason why.
I also felt like there was so much more to tell. We get just a few glimpses of the pair throughout roughly four decades of their lives. I guess this is a good thing: they are such great characters that I was left wanting more.
One of the real strengths of the book is that neither protagonist is entirely likeable. It isn’t so much that they often make poor decisions - that is the human experience. Rather, it is that we see inside their heads enough to see the yucky stuff: the things they hate about each other, their petty resentments, their unkindness, their selfishness. Perhaps the reason this feels so uncomfortable is that it functions as a mirror to our own inner darkness.
The book starts off with a series of events in Jane’s life that will haunt her throughout the book. After getting laid off, her father goes into a deep depression, which he only emerges from when he is given a job offer that takes him back to Taiwan. It is only supposed to last a year, but when Jane visits him three years later, it becomes clear that he will never come back to the family.
He also discloses to Jane, who is not yet an adult, that he is gay.
Jane doesn’t take this well at all, even though she is coming to suspect that she isn’t straight either, and outs him to her mother, severing the family, and eventually ending in her dad’s suicide.
Fiona’s backstory comes next, and it too is tied up with trauma. Her father is never mentioned in the family, and her mother is clearly on the outs with her parents because she insists on raising Fiona on her own. We eventually learn that she was conceived via statutory rape, creating a rather ambivalent relationship between mother, daughter, and granddaughter.
I’ll just mention some of the other incidents, which are mostly along the lines of typical life events. Both Jane and Fiona go in and out of relationships. Fiona drops out of law school. Jane never finishes college, despite being smart. Friends and relatives die. There is some underage drinking and drug use. There are sexual experiences. There are affairs and divorces, betrayals and rescues. Casual (and often stupid) racism is a fact of life for many of the characters, most of which are not white.
Running through the entire book, though, is the deep question of friendship. Friendships are funny things. They can be intense, deep, and close, and yet also temporary. How many of us have grown apart from friends of our youth, especially our childhood?
This is why the relationship between Fiona and Jane feels so ambiguous. Are they the best of friends like they were as children? Probably not. Do they grow apart for a time? Yes, and it was necessary for both of them. The good news is that it seems that as they grow into middle age, they have both evolved in a way that keeps them together, even as marriage and children and geography keep them from being as tight as they were as kids.
As I said, the two of them together are interesting enough - and separately - that you really do want their adventures to continue. You want to know what happened in the intervening years between each story. And, I would add as well, you want to know about the other characters too, who are well drawn and interesting.
It’s a worthy book, and one that I enjoyed.
The audiobook is narrated by Natalie Naudus, who does a fine job of separating the voices, including those of Jane and Fiona, so that it is pretty obvious who is speaking.
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