Young women in limbo

Hello!

Lately, stories featuring women in their early twenties linger with me long after I’ve finished reading. In hindsight, I see myself at that age as confronting a series of forks in roads. One way led to love and domestic entanglement. The other way, a life of work and solitude. Back then, I didn’t always appreciate what was at stake.

The thing about forks in roads is that they aren’t always obvious.

There is a word for how it feels to look back at my younger self with the knowledge of the major consequences looming behind every minor-seeming choice. It's énouement, that bittersweet emotion of having arrived at a point in the future when you know how the plot turned out but being unable to tell your past self. I felt this way on every page of Practice, British author Rosalind Brown’s debut novel.

In Practice, 21-year-old Annabel, an undergraduate at Oxford, must write an essay, due the following day, about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Most of the book takes place in Annabel’s dorm room, which she finds the perfect place to contemplate Shakespeare’s sonnets: “Compared to the ravenous, jeering crowd of the theatre: the sonnet’s narrow room, where one can hole up and take oneself extremely seriously.” A room is also the perfect container for this 199-page novel, given Annabel’s focus on poetic stanzas (a word that means “room” in Italian) and love of Virginia (“room of one’s own”) Woolf.

The novel begins when Annabel wakes up and ends when she goes to sleep. In the intervening hours, we are present for her every thought, emotion, and bodily sensation. The intimacy of the narration—in the bathroom, for example—may rub some readers the wrong way. I loved every toilet flush; it helps that Brown is an exquisite writer.

Practice brought me back to the years that I spent reading and writing in a quiet room. Like Annabel, I was a bookish, serious college student. I lived by myself in an apartment off campus, working part-time in my college’s writing center to pay the rent. My schedule was the same every day. I woke at 6:00 a.m. to drink coffee, read, and write in my journal before taking the bus to school to study and meet with writing students in the library. In the evenings, I