A lot of the queer fiction I have been recently has featured characters living in either New York or the Pacific North West, or both. Places with widespread acceptance of queerness, or at least enough that the characters are rarely under threat for it within the text, regardless of the real world. The Secret of You and Me on the other hand, draws much of it’s power from the inverse, from a lack of acceptance in community, of what it feels like when you are certain that being honest with yourself and others will have more dangerous ramifications. This is a book of queer pain, of feeling like you have not lived the life you wanted or hoped, and of taking the steps to set things right. I loved it so much. It hurt and honestly, it might not have been good for me to push through on a couple of days I was reading it, but I was so drawn in by the story and the turmoil of the two main characters.
After Nora’s father dies, she is forced to return to the small Texas town where she grew up, the town she fled 18 years earlier. Greeting her is her family, her former friends, and most of town, ogling the bereaved to figure out why she had been away for so long, and why she had left in the first place. Also waiting for her is Sophie. The reason she fled. Sophie who now has a family with Nora’s ex boyfriend, a charming daughter and a life of seeming privilefge in town.
The Secret of You and Me tells it’s story in a dual perspective from first person each time. This way of narrating gave the whole thing a raw edge, with little distance from each character’s trauma and pain in a way I found very powerful. Nora and Sophie have spent the past 18 years trying to distance themselves from the events of their youth and have both failed in their own ways. The ways in which the sins of the past encroach into their lives, into their thoughts hit me in so many ways that I had to take breaks from the book on several occasions, despite my desire to keep going.
From a metatextual level, there is also something wonderful about reading this book with a little knowledge of how it happened and where it went. According to the author, it started as a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion but was derailed when she quickly realised that her lead was in love with her best friend. Back in the world, Lenhardt has talked about how it was in the aftermath of writing this book and whilst writing her follow up that she herself realised that she herself was a lesbian. Even if the journey seems on the page to be a hard one, there is something amazing about seeing an author work through things to discover themselves, whether they realise that is happening yet or not. The queer art that people make when they are closeted, whether they know that fact or know at the time of it’s creation, is such a rich mine of emotion to me, I am a sucker for it in all forms, this no different.