Review of Almost Life by Kieran Millwood Hargrave – A Strange Love Story | imaginary

gAlthough the novels are routinely promoted as the remake of some previous novel, Almost Life will undoubtedly be heralded as One Day Meets Ordinary People for a Sexually Fluid Generation. Featuring romantic resonances that span many years and an unironic look at the youthful psyche, it is indeed relatable.

The novel begins in 1978 Paris with a moment of rapprochement on the steps of the Sacred Heart when students Laure Boutin and Erika Parker first glimpse each other, then tease the reader with more than 400 pages of misunderstanding, ecstasy and sorrow. This is a story of missed opportunities, the choices we make, and queer and bisexual love in different social climates.

“With a slightly terrifying aura,” the uncompromising Parisian Laure “did not expect to meet an angel on the steps of the basilica.” Erica, six years her junior, beautiful and clumsy, comes across as a nervous English tourist. She’s supposedly straight, spending the summer in France before starting university, while Laure is an eccentric seductress who treats her conquests with relatively little affection. Until Erica swung into view. Coup de Voudre.

Kieran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning children’s and historical novelist, and Paris in the late 1970s is presented convincingly but at length, along with an abundance of drunken philosophical discourse, which bogs down the pace. Erica is soon drawn into the low-budget world of Laure and her cultured friends, with all its art, literature, bar action and theorizing. The two women are in love, though they manage to taint the enthusiasm with classic youthful paranoia and over-explanation. Laure has a problem with alcohol, and Erica struggles with sexuality and self-doubt. Now, forever, she plays “versions of her life that fast forward, stay, and don’t stay.”

Erica returns to Norfolk, and Laure loses her best friend Michelle to an illness that has been undiagnosed for a long time as the AIDS crisis unfolds. Bisexual Erica knows “she can’t live the way Laure and her friends live, on the fringes of things… Loving Laure won’t be simple.” Erica dates men and then a woman at the University of East Anglia, and one chapter of the novel begins with unimportant details and student conversations that could have benefited from more severe cutting and burning.

Almost at the heart of Life is the oft-thwarted love story between Laure and Erika, and all its joy and brilliant tension lies in the scenes between them rather than in the sections when their separate stories meander at a glacial, maddening pace while they write each other occasional letters. However, the obstacles to their being together are real and convincing, avoiding the navel-gazing qualms of some contemporary sad girls.

One of the beauties of this novel is that both women are real and deeply flawed, Erica with her sometimes selfish selfishness and Laure with her addictions and inflexibility. Erica, who is “so entangled in her stupid, self-absorbed fantasies and revenge plots”, sometimes thinks she is “playing lesbians with Laure”, yet she knows in her heart that their love is much deeper, at a time when homosexual and heterosexual lifestyles were largely incompatible. The road less taken does not suit Erica, yet her mind never leaves it.

After they made their hesitant choices, “This other reality was there, where she and Erika were. It was there all these years.” Although there is an obvious trope of a strange character towards the end, the novel becomes increasingly propulsive: sensitive, sad, multi-layered, and a moving examination of true love and passion. Melwood Hargrave’s debut novel for adults, The Mercies, was an instant bestseller in 2020. And this update of the theme looks all set to become a Gen Z hit.