"O n the first track of Lily Allen's breakup album West End Girl, we hear a long phone call that leads to a marriage's unravelling. Allen listens, confused then hurt, for almost two minutes as a presumed husband on the other end asks to open up the relationship. Fans made the obvious connection to Allen's own marriage to David Harbour, the cop from Stranger Things (who is perhaps equally well known for his tasteful Brooklyn townhouse)."
"The book has a dual timeline structure and sends up the well-worn tropes: the sleazy hotel room, the champagne bucket, the escalating lies told to spouses. The structure is experimental; the timelines converge and diverge, beginning, toward the end, to blur. In fiction anyway, infidelity is infinitely iterative, a way to frame and explore contemporary life, a setup with implicit stakes a shared home and maybe children."
"In recent years we have seen the reprisal of the academic affair novel (Julia May Jonas's satirical romp Vladimir; Emily Adrian's sly and witty Seduction Theory); the rise of the polyamory novel (Raven Leilani's electric Luster, in which a young Black woman navigates the messiness of moving in with her boyfriend and his wife); and the throuple blockbuster (Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends and Intermezzo)."
Lily Allen's West End Girl opens with a lengthy phone call in which a presumed husband asks to open the relationship, prompting public links to her marriage to David Harbour. Tabloid accounts claim the couple experimented with polyamory and that Harbour broke agreed rules, fueling gruesome public rubbernecking around betrayal. A contemporary novel titled The Ten Year Affair uses a dual-timeline, comedic structure to satirize infidelity tropes and blur timelines. Infidelity remains a recurrent narrative device, from classical myths to modern fiction, with recent trends including academic affair novels, polyamory novels, and throuple-centered works.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]