Photograph courtesy Eloise King-Clements
Lily King, the best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and five other novels, is coming to Joseph-Beth Booksellers on November 11 to discuss and read from her latest release, Heart the Lover (Grove Atlantic). Her work has been recognized with a Kirkus Prize, a New England Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award.
Image courtesy Lily King
The beautiful and evocative Heart the Lover tells the story of a college senior who dates a fellow English major and then falls in love with his housemate. Nicknamed Jordan by the boys, the narrator finds herself in the middle of a love triangle during a tumultuous season of ambiguity and change. It prompted me to reflect on how the actions of the unformed girl I was in my early twenties anticipated the woman I’d become. Choices I thought were incidental or random had a huge impact on my life.
When I mention this insight to King in an interview, she says, “That’s exactly what I wanted to capture, without saying it. I just wanted it to be on the page. God, youth. It becomes more miraculous the farther you get from it. You’re acting from such a strange place of impulse and ignorance and with no idea how your childhood has impacted you and your response to the world.”
King says she felt like she had a blindfold on for all of her twenties. “In the book I try to show the buffeting of youth, the way things are always knocking Jordan around, or at least that’s how it feels to her,” she says. “And yet there is some force in her holding steady, pushing on.”
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