Frida Slattery as Herself by Ana Kinsella: book review

Frida Slattery as Herself by Ana Kinsella

When Frida Slattery and John Reddan's paths collide, they're both a little lost, early in their careers and desperate to make something great. Or, in Frida's case, to find acting work at all. While John is gaining momentum as a director, he's still young and hungry, desperate to find the project that will solidify his future prospects. Out of drama school, Frida hasn't managed to do much. But when they meet in a pub in 2005, everything changes. John finds his muse, and Frida finds her first major role in Dublin theatre. As the book traverses the next sixteen years, the two fall in and out of each other's lives both romantically and creatively. What they shared together left an indelible mark on them both, but how that patinas in the memory is different. 

This is a long novel about a long period of time, but Kinsella makes this work. She keeps us intimately close to the characters as they evolve and often spend more time apart than together as the novel progresses. It is a beautiful ode to the creation of art and to a life dedicated to the practice. It's a novel about Frida coming into her own and finding her voice alongside those that she performs on stage. It's  about a romantic relationship that never formally begins or ends, always an open question in both of their minds. And it's about looking back on the choices and events of your youth and seeing them through many different lenses.

I do feel like the book was most vital and engaged in the earlier segments as John and Frida first connect and they work on their early run of successful (and not so successful) plays. It feels like the book loses a bit of the magic that it never fully recaptures when John and Frida part ways and spend most of the book separated. I think this is partly owing to the fact that the book starts taking on larger and larger swaths of time and also backfilling events more often than giving them to us as they unfolded. This didn't really bother me. The book is very much caught up in the characters' thought loops, so learning about things through their rumination was fitting but maybe didn't have quite the same energy as when they were in the same room, bouncing off one another. By the end, I felt like I'd learned so much about these two people, but I also felt more distant from them than when I began reading. This isn't necessarily a critique of the writing. I think the shift is true to life. As we get older, life loses some of its urgent, bursting immediacy, and people become more guarded. It is a believable twenty-year span because of some of these tactics Kinsella employs, and the reality that they grow into different people is felt as well as known. Though I do have to say that some of the emotional resonance was lost in the name of giving real estate to big intellectual ideas that had already been discussed earlier in the novel, without adding much new to the idea.

I immensely enjoyed my time reading this novel. I carved weird hours out of my day for it and found any excuse to get back to reading, even though I'd previously been in a horrible slump. It's got all the right ingredients and a large amount of ambition that makes it even more interesting. I think what struck me most by the end was the way that Kinsella manages to capture the connections that haunt us and how many different forms and feelings that love can fit into over
decades. I commend the way she captures the complexity of it, particularly in Frida's character, and how her relationship with John, even just in her head, remains so complex and even gets more complicated with the distance. It felt very realistic and deeply felt. 

Overall: 4