Writers & Lovers by Lily King

Casey has ended up back in Massachusetts after a devastating love affair. Her mother has just died and she is knocked sideways by grief and loneliness, moving between the restaurant where she waitresses for the Harvard elite and the rented shed she calls home. Her one constant is the novel she has been writing for six years, but at thirty-one she is in debt and directionless, and feels too old to be that way - it's strange, not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. And then, one evening, she meets Silas. He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar walks into her restaurant, his two boys in tow. He is older, grieving the loss of his wife, and wrapped up in his own creativity. Suddenly Casey finds herself at the point of a love triangle, torn between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures.Lily King's Writers & Lovers follows Casey in the last days of a long youth, a time when everything - her family, her work, her relationships - comes to a crisis. Hugely moving and impossibly funny, it is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. It is a novel about love and creativity, and ultimately it captures the moment when a woman becomes an artist.

ok bookstagram u made a point with this one

One sentence synopsis... Casey is a struggling writer whose life is a series of deaths, tragedies, and grief... yet somehow every man she meets falls over his feet to ask her out. .

Read it if you like... navel gazing writers writing about wrought writing. The main character is like if “Girls” was only about Hannah being a self-centered, obnoxious artist but with Adam Driver as her boyfriend. .

Dream casting... the only person who could redeem Casey on film is the magnetic Merritt Wever. Matthew Gray Gubler as Silas, one third of the love triangle.

What a lovely book. Genuinely had me smiling. Every character dynamic and likable and painfully human

This is essentially a story about someone in a precarious spot in life finally catching a break and moving on to more stability. Casey has overwhelming student debt that she can barely afford to make payments on, she's been dumped by her boyfriend, she's not making progress on the novel she's been working on for 6 years, and she is grieving the sudden death of her mother. She works as a waitress at a high end restaurant and lives in what used to be a garden shed attached to the back of a nice house in Somerville. With all the financial pressure and grief, it's not surprising that Casey has anxiety attacks.

Casey's friend Muriel offers to read her novel draft, and from there things start to move. Muriel likes the draft and suggests some changes, which gives Casey new energy to work on it. She finishes the novel and sends it out to publishers to see if she can get a book deal.

In the meantime, she is developing relationships with two different men: Silas, a struggling writer like herself who comes on strong and then disappears repeatedly, and Oscar, an established writer and widower with two young sons, who is a bit overbearing. Neither of these men seem that great to me, but it's clear that Casey will end up with one of them by the end of the book.

I wasn't satisfied with the story this book told, but I did like the details in King's writing. The scenes of waiting tables in the restaurant, of Casey's panic attacks, of babysitting Oscar's kids–all of these were precise, full, and wonderful to read.