BINGO: Purple
cw: self-harm, internalized fatphobia
hot take immediately reminded of the french film À la folie… pas du tout which is also about erotomania, then went to watch the trailer, found everyone’s comments underneath being about having watched this in french class as well, which I find to be quite amusing (Audrey Tautou is probably just a prime French Class actress because she enunciates very precisely)
A bit of an exciting read–the author is a friend of a friend from Book Group, and she’ll be attending our next session where we discuss this book! I feel like noting that this has in no way impacted my review, but it does mean that I kept thinking of Intelligent Questions to ask while reading. And perhaps writing this review will also help me!
We’re dropped immediately into the meat of his book, and it doesn’t take long to figure out what’s going on–our main character, Alice, lives in London where she lives a mildly aimless life. At one point she had aspirations of law, but instead is half-engaged paralegal and sometimes house cleaner. Well, to be clear, she’s now only one person’s house cleaner, Tom, who is her soul mate, her twin flame, and actually she’s doing that whole creepy stalker thing, wherein she rests next to the divot on his bed to imagine sleeping next to him, and drinks from his cup whilst overlaying her lips on his Vaseline marks, etc etc. She’s full delusional land, but doesn’t really understand it (or she does, in bits and pieces, and firmly pushes those moments aside). She’s taken up volunteering at a local elder care home where Tom’s grandfather is being kept, which she knows because she read his open email on his laptop where he discussed it with his family. So like, yes, full-on imaginary world stuff.
Alice is certain that when she and Tom actually meet, they will be truly in love and her life will turn around. They will have beautiful children, his family will adore her, her family will finally respect her, he’ll happily and casually touch her out of care. In the meanwhile she’ll go on dates with other men to practice how to date properly, how to be the sort of man that Tom will adore.
It’s all very heady and you read it with a mildly icky sense of voyeurism–you know Alice needs help, but if she doesn’t get it then you’ll continue to have this front seat in her descent into increasingly unhinged activities. Her self-delusion also extends to her family–her (more successful, conventionally skinny) sister Cass and her (pretty, white, mildly clueless) mother–to whom she sends carefully staged instagram shots pretending to be on runs and out to brunch. Her colleagues are strangers she treats with barely concealed disdain.
You do feel pity for Alice, though there’s an element of “well…you do do this to yourself.” It’s clear that as a fat half-Pakistani half-white woman, she struggles with self esteem and body image issues, and has severely disordered eating habits. She fills the emotional void in her life with food, with the feeling of emptiness extending to her stomach and to her heart. This part of the book probably had me the most uncomfortable, but not so much on a plot basis–more that, I felt a bit protective of this brown woman with body hair and soft bits that she scratches and pinches and grasps with revulsion. That the author is a friend of a friend makes it a bit better, because otherwise I’d probably have problems with how she describes herself one day as “light enough to be thought of as Greek.”