COMMENTARY: Laura & Emma (2018)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading Laura & Emma (2018) by Kate Greathead. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work. For self-study purposes, there may also be extensive summaries of the plot in these notes. In short…
⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️
- 1980 - No thoughts so far. Woman in 1980s doesn’t like sex, doesn’t want kids, sees a psychoanalyst. So I guess asexual or aromantic before that was labeled?
- 1981/pg. 22 - ok. She’s 32, has a job she doesn’t need because trust fund, and was super close to her brother who is five years younger, as she practically raised him, but post boarding school, where he was sent to be toughened up, grew distant and apart. Good foreshadowing for the single-mother-daughter relationship that’s the premise of the book perhaps.
- 1981/pg. 34 - is she going to miss her abortion because of a trapped sparrow??? I don’t know if this is hyper-literary or realistic. It’s definitely a story. Oops missed my abortion and decided to have a child because a sparrow flew into my apartment and I spent an hour trying to catch to.
- 1981/pg. 35 - holy shit. She did change her mind because of the sparrow. The line from the page before was all it took: “the skin-touch memory of its weightless warmth, the swollen curve of its downy breast, the delicate tremble of its beleaguered heartbeat as she’d carried it to the window.”
- 1982/pg. 49 - “Does anyone know the fastest route to Staten Island?” He asked the group. They all shook their heads; no one had ever been there.” That is the most rich white elitist Manhattenite thing ever. Hilarious.
- 1984/pg. 66 - that was a very cute father-daughter moment when Bibs stormed out after the Stephanie critique.
- 1985/pg. 73 - yeah, ok. Rich people. She doesn’t even need this job and she pulls this off.
- 1986/pg. 86 - right. It’s the eighties. You had to go places and pick stuff up and people couldn’t just email you PDFs. I was five in 1986. The amount of places my parents drove me because I couldn’t just be left home is mind-boggling now in retrospect.
- 1987/pg. 100 - she gets paid full time for part time work and she gets a paid vacation during wedding season so nobody can book it… AND again, this is a job she doesn’t need to do????!!!! Fuck off rich people. You can fuck right off.
- 1988/pg. 150 - ok… I seriously thought that this would pick up to have a bit more plot or some sort of arc… but it’s literally a series of anecdotes strung together. Some memorable, some not. With Rich and Pretty (2016), the middle was the bachelorette party, which led to the wedding and the time jump. This… it’s just a string of anecdotes there’s no rising nor falling tension. So I don’t know. I’m thinking about A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), which is technically another “quiet novel” too… and there were moments of rising and falling tension there. Each chapter or scene had a goal and conflict/obstacles to overcome. It was just an “interesting anecdote”. So this novel isn’t working for me.
- 1988/ pg. 156 - summary of this book: men are mean to this short, pretty single mother but you don’t feel sorry for her because she’s filthy rich and has a lot of white privileges.
- 1988/pg. 171 - is it because they found out Dr. Brown is gay? Is that why he’s second fiddle now? Everyone in this book just pisses me off. The republicans, the rich people, Laura for being so dense and naive and airheaded.
- 1988/pg. 183 - you know what this book is like, it’s like those twee reader digest anecdotes from the 80s or that boring Canadian author we all go gaga over. What’s his name? Stuart McLean or something with his Norman Rockwell stories that go nowhere and remind you of a time that never actually existed? Everything is pleasant and unearned? Is that what’s bothering me? That Laura’s life is unearned? She’s rich and boring and everything was handed to her and I had to be clever and witty to get where I’m at because I grew up poor? I dunno. Literature is about getting into other people’s heads especially those you don’t necessarily agree or identify with, but this woman is not winning any sympathy at all nor is she fascinating. At least with Humbert Humbert, you’re constantly repulsed by his
pedophiliahebephilia if we’re nitpicking. - 1990/pg. 198 - wtf did I just read?! That was extremely disturbing.
- 1990/pg. 210 - JFC is something interesting finally happening? Will Philomena save this book with actual intelligence, wisdom, or erudition?
- oof. This is the first line that actually hit me in the feels this whole book: “and with Bibs gone, it was more obvious than ever that they took no joy or even comfort in each other’s company.”
- 1990/pg. 211 - ”Laura felt like they were characters in a play about WASPs — a satirical production that yielded no insights, just dessicated clichés. She imagined an Upper West Side Jewish audience getting bored and leaving before intermission” Yeah… you just critiqued your own book and I completely agree with you.
- 1991/pg. 247 - so both James and Philomena are nothing burgers and now Stephanie is having a second child.
- 1993/ that was a genuinely funny chapter. Just a short interaction between mother and daughter about periods and drugs.
- 1994/pg. 266 - POV change to 12yo Emma. She’s like already 100% more interesting. Or have I been numbed into submission with this book where anything new is interesting?? lol.
- 1994/pg. 280 - Emma as a teenager feels like a caricature of a teenager. :/