Topics of Conversation

by Miranda Popkey

  WORKS CITED

  The line “Happy, with a secret,” quoted by the tenant in “Ann Arbor, 2002,” is spoken by Mark Ruffalo’s character, Stan, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry. Though the film premiered in 2004 and so could not have been seen by the tenant at the time she “quotes” it, the reference is deliberate.

  The Swedish video artist’s exhibit described in “San Francisco, 2010,” was, in part, inspired by Sophie Calle’s Missing, an exhibition on view at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture from June 29 to August 20, 2017.

  The details of the party at which Norman Mailer stabbed his second wife, née Adele Morales, and of his relationship with her, is drawn from various texts including Mailer: A Biography, by Mary V. Dearborn; Norman Mailer: The American, directed by Joseph Mantegna; and The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer, by Adele Mailer.

  The short story described by the narrator in “San Joaquin Valley, 2017,” is inspired by Sam Shephard’s short story, “Coalinga ½ Way.”

  Also in “San Joaquin Valley, 2017,” the text the narrator refers to but cannot remember and which proposes that violence onscreen argues, inevitably, for itself, is Renata Adler’s “. . . The Movies Make Heroes of Them All,” an essay collected in A Year in the Dark.

  The idea of a “Works (Not) Cited” section comes from Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel Fra Keeler.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A writer shoves into her first novel more or less everything she has ever thought, seen, read, loved, hated, experienced. I believe this, true or false. Put another way: I have done this, good or bad. What I mean to say is that if I were to acknowledge every single person, institution, or text that supported or inspired me during the gestation of or found its way somehow into Topics of Conversation, this section would be longer than the novel itself. What I mean also to say is: if we’ve ever had a conversation or shared a meal or even traded work e-mails, thank you.

  Thank you to my parents, Ada and Michael. Thank you to the Popkeys: Dan and Nick and Challis; Ross and Kristi; Sally and Kent. Thank you to the Marcheses: Giuseppina and Salvatore; Antonella and Paolo; Anna and Claudio and Gaetano and Jessica and Davide; Mina and Luca and Caterina and Aurora. Thank you to the MacLaughlins: Ann; Jay; Nina; Sam; and Molly Fischer and Pam Murray.

  In St. Louis, thank you to Washington University and to the writers in the fiction cohorts above and below mine: Sara Duff and Jae Kim and Meghan Lamb and Joel Sherman and Paul Sung; Elizabeth Baird and Rebecca Butler and Charles McCrory and Madeleine Moss and Analeah Rosen and Red Samaniego. Special thanks to the fiction writers in my cohort: Miguel Morales and Erin Peraza and Robin Tripp and Jenny Wu. Thank you to Cassie Donish and again Sara Duff and Erinrose Mager and Emma Wilson and Sasha Wiseman and Christina Wood Martinez and Billy Youngblood. Thank you to my professors: Kathryn Davis and Danielle Dutton and Marshall Klimasewiski; also Steven Meyer and Martin Riker. Thank you to Shannon Rabong and to Dave Schuman.

  Thank you to Julia Galeota. Thank you to Emily Gould, Lynn Steger Strong, and Monika Woods.

  Thank you to my therapist in New York and my therapist in St. Louis, neither of whom I have slept with.

  Thank you to 67 Edgewood and the QuikTrip on Kingshighway and the fried chicken at Schnucks.

  Thank you to Louise Glück, who gave me permission to write fiction.

  Thank you to Ben Marcus, who gave me permission to write a novel.

  Thank you to Denise Shannon and Jordan Pavlin for placing their trust in me as a writer and in this manuscript as a book before I had much of any in either. Thank you to Jacqueline Sather and Nicholas Thomson. At Knopf, thank you to the production editor, Andrew Dorko; the managing editor, Kathy Hourigan; the production manager, Lorraine Hyland; the text designer, Anna Knighton; Emily Murphy in marketing; Emily Reardon in publicity; and the copyeditor, Bonnie Thompson. Thank you to Maria Švarbová, whose stunning photograph is used on the jacket; thank you to Jennifer Carrow and Sinem Erkas for their work on the jacket. Thank you to Brian Etling in sales. At Serpent’s Tail, thank you to Peter Dyer, the creative director; Graeme Hall, the editorial manager; Ali Nadal, the production manager; Hannah Ross, the publicity director; and especially Nick Sheerin, the acquiring editor. Thank you to Debra Helfand, for teaching me the value of a good managing editor.

  Thank you to Gabriel Winslow-Yost for his friendship and for innumerable book and film recommendations and most especially for suffering through an early draft of this novel, even the icky sex bits.

  Thank you to Zan Romanoff and Nozlee Samadzadeh-Hadidi for loving me even and especially when I insist I do not wish to be loved.

  Thank you to Dudley, aka the Hund, aka Hundable, aka the Hundable Notion, aka the Notional Concept, aka Meefy. You are not a very good editor, but you are a very good dog.

  And thank you to Will. All we need is just a little patience.

  Miranda Popkey has written for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. She lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Topics of Conversation is her first novel.

  Thanks for reading!

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  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

  Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  29 Cloth Fair

  London

  EC1A 7JQ

  www.serpentstail.com

  First published in the United States in 2020 by

  Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, New York

  Copyright © by Miranda Popkey, 2020

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photograph by Maria Švarbová

  Jacket design by Sinem Erkas

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788164047

  eISBN 9781782836414