Shining Pages

Author: Melissa Broder

Publication: May 1, 2018 by Hogarth Press

At A Glance:

Lucy has been writing her dissertation about Sappho for thirteen years when she and Jamie break up. After she hits rock bottom in Phoenix, her Los Angeles-based sister insists Lucy housesit for the summer—her only tasks caring for a beloved diabetic dog and trying to learn to care for herself. Annika’s home is a gorgeous glass cube atop Venice Beach, but Lucy can find no peace from her misery and anxiety—not in her love addiction group therapy meetings, not in frequent Tinder meetups, not in Dominic the foxhound’s easy affection, not in ruminating on the ancient Greeks. Yet everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer one night while sitting alone on the beach rocks.

Whip-smart, neurotically funny, sexy, and above all, fearless, The Pisces is built on a premise both sirenic and incredibly real—what happens when you think love will save you but are afraid it might also kill you.

My Thoughts:

I can certainly say I have never read a book like The Pisces. Equal parts funny, equal parts WTF, The Pisces is a reading experience I won't soon forget. If you are searching for a book where a woman is undergoing an existential crisis, contemplates how to escape the void, goes to group therapy, and oh, falls in love with a merman, you can stop looking!

The main character, Lucy, explores feelings of ennui, nothingness, depression, and suicide, but turning towards the ocean and the fantasy of the merman helps her evade these dark thoughts. Lucy is the epitome of a Pisces - rather than facing the entrapment of a domestic life, she would rather entertain her imagination and the ocean provides a source of rejuvenation. Pisces can also be heavily impacted by depression, leading to instability and addictions. Melissa Broder weaves her humor throughout the book effortlessly, and I'd highly recommend taking a look at her Twitter and interviews for more content.

This book brings to mind what it really means to be fulfilled and have a "full" life. Is it all pretend? Are we just avoiding the feeling that we are not fulfilled? Or do we use psychics and crystals to give us a sense of ownership over our fate - that maybe we can receive answers and guide our fates in the direction we want to go. I think that Lucy can be a very relatable character for many, because she is honest about the foundation of human beings - our existence. She doesn't hide from these feelings and could even be considered more self-aware than most. It also makes you think about the meaning of the relationships we choose to have in our lives. Are we using them or are we being used? Lucy struggles with answering these questions, and reminds readers that these questions have existed since the time of Greek gods and goddesses. 

The types of relationships that Lucy has is an important aspect of the book as well, whether they are familial, platonic, or romantic. She takes value from each of them, but seems to be stuck on the one that is evading her - the romantic. She becomes fixated on finding love, but neglects the idea that she could find inner self-love through her familial and platonic relationships. Due to the existential nature of the novel, you'll find that you are along for the ride in The Pisces and contemplating how you would answer Lucy's soul-searching questions.

P.S. Found some exciting news that Claire Foy (played Queen Elizabeth in Netflix's The Crown) will be starring in the movie adaptation!

Quotables:

"The trick, I now agreed, was you had to remain unattached to any future wishes or vision. You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They only happened as long as you didn’t need anything from anyone. As long as you didn’t take anything from anyone or give any part of yourself away to another person, but you just sort of met the other person in space, good things could happen. You had to fall in love with quiet first." - page 43

"No one really wanted satiety. It was the prospect of satiety – the excitement around the notion that we could ever be satisfied – that kept us going. But if you were ever actually satisfied it wouldn’t be satisfaction. You would just get hungry for something else. The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it." - page 104

"This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century." - page 235

"If I died for him, it was kind of like him not texting me back on a cosmic level." - page 247

My Rating: ♓♓♓1/2

If You Like This, Read This:

TBD if I ever read a book like this again.

BUT, I found this list on Goodreads that may get you closer to what you're looking for: women vs the void

Who Inspires the Author?

• Turkish Delight - Jan Wolkers
• Scorch Atlas - Blake Butler
• Coeur de Lion - Ariana Reines
• Blue Eyes, Black Hair - Marguerite Duras
• The Seas - Samantha Hunt
• Motherhood - Sheila Heti
• The Professor and the Siren - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• The Lost Daughter - Elena Ferrante
• Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
• If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Sappho and Anne Carson
• Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments - Sappho and Aaron Poochigian

For Further Reading Pleasure:

• Pisces Needs the Ocean
• Fish-tailed Toxic Masculinity in Melissa Broder's 'The Pisces'
• An Interview with Melissa Broder