What’s in it for you:
What’s it about?
The Answers centers around a famous director stuck working on the same passion project. He believes that he needs to be loved in order to find the motivation to finish his new film. With his mountains of money and influence, he creates a project to see if he can outsource all the different “roles” a romantic partner would play to different women.
Cultural Background:
Besides a few reviews in prominent publications, I don’t believe this book has made a huge splash.
What to Expect:
The Answers has a dark undertone. We follow one girlfriend, the Emotional Girlfriend, and meet a few others. Sometimes their lives are rough. I see this as a light Black Mirror episode, if there can ever be such a thing.
Looking at all the different girlfriend roles, it’s hard not to think about your own role in relationships. Are you more a maternal or intellectual romantic partner? Does it depend on who you were with? This shtick is probably the best part of the novel.
What I got out of it:
Why this book?
I found out about The Answers in magazines and the NY Times Book review. The new (to me) somewhat dystopian take on relationships sounded interesting.
What I Learned
While we follow the Emotional Girlfriend, the Anger Girlfriend had the most depth. The quotes below are mostly related to her.
Quotes
Self-defence, he reasoned to her mother, who just said, be careful with your face, to which Ashley said nothing, already exhausted of this lie, that the best thing a woman could become was a magazine page, motionless, silent. Shreddable.
Ashley’s father saw his daughter become beautiful and dangerously attractive. He signed her up for self-defense classes when she was young. When we meet her as the Anger Girlfriend, she’s trying to become a professional MMA fighter..
The older she got, the more beautiful she became, and though she tried to hide herself in jerseys and baggy pants, there was no hiding her face, no getting out of her body.
No matter what you look like, there are always struggles. For Ashley, she was always beautiful and that drew attention that became too much for her to handle. From a young age, men had leered at her. It never stopped, no matter how she tried to hide her own body.
And it seemed to Ashley that boys grew up to be men, but girls just stayed girls as long as the whole world agreed to treat them this way, liabilities, precious objects, things to be protected or told what to do.
Thankfully, this frame of mind is slowly changing. We’re learning to call women women rather than girls. We’re teaching others not to use terms of endearment with women who aren’t their romantic partners, young daughters, or currently living in the 1960s.
No comment needed for these next two quotes:
Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.
Not being gay felt like a failing, somehow, less evolved.
What is your favorite urban science fiction or fantasy story? Share it with us in the comments section below.
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