A review by dfwsusie
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You by Kyle McCarthy
5.0
Woman-centric Friendship Novels are tricky to pull off. The choice becomes picking a realistic or romantic narrative, and inevitably people seeking the former will be unhappy reading the latter.
Personally, I like gritty, messy, vicious, beautiful, painful, or powerful representations of relationships. Everyone Knows How Much I Love You is a novel about female friendship in NYC, to a point. However, this isn't a romanticized post-Sex In the City vision of sisters out there empowering each other and clinking martinis.
Time and the passage of years fundamentally alters all relationships. Just like matter, friendships are subject to entropy and become more complicated as the collective history piles up.
The book rolls out in four non-linear phases, occuring in 1999, 2012, sometime in 2015-2016, and 2020. Even though there were plenty of clues, I didn't realize until the very end that the 2012 sections were not the narrator's current time. The whole story is told while looking in the rearview mirror. Given the influence of the Arrow of Time in our memories, it makes sense why all the chaotic actions of previous days seem so ordered and sensible to Rose.
Usually the reader isn't privy to the inner dialogue of the bad girl. Even when toxic friendships are told so perfectly, like in [b:The Robber Bride|17650|The Robber Bride|Margaret Atwood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388263287l/17650._SY75_.jpg|1119196] by [a:Margaret Atwood|3472|Margaret Atwood|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1282859073p2/3472.jpg] what makes the terrible friend tick isn't the focus. Here we see and hear Rose's motivations for consistently putting everyone on a collision course with annihilation. I never cheered Rose on, but there were points where I could see how she justified her own terrible actions.
I saw Rose described a few places as an unreliable narrator. Everyone telling a story about their past is unreliable, so that's perhaps misleading. The only way unreliable fits is if Rose herself willfully abandoned or warped the facts for a better story.
This is possible, as her editor kept urging her to punch up the details, create a character with a mental map, etc. Perhaps she did that and we are simply reading a work of fiction about a work of fiction. Going down that road may be a little out there, but technically the Lacie/Ian roommate situation was predicated on a ton of coincidence. It's possible only the 1999 section is based in anything real.
Many summaries centered on the "envy" and "jealousy" aspects of Rose and Lacie. But to be envious is to want what someone else has for your own. Rose's real desire appears to be complete dominion over Lacie. She wanted, consciously or not, to leave her with nowhere else to turn for comfort, emotional connection, and sexual release.
Rose isn't the stereotypic jealous girlfriend either. She's a power-hungry annihilator. Even in 2020, remorse is absent. Instead, Rose believes she protected Lacie from betrayal and abandonment at each turn.
Neither does Rose seem particularly angry at Ian for his emotional rejection after intense sexual connection. She's really angry at Lacie for reconnecting with a guy who cheats. That overarching lack of impulse control halts Rose from having a healthy relationship with anyone, and also puts the people closest to her in a ring of fire.
In the end, this distinction is what hooked me. McCarthy doesn't give us an easy Mean Girls II story. Instead, we get to peek inside the mind of a brilliant, damaged, obsessive woman for a while. One who has motives likely hidden even to herself. Unlike many of the books I read where the author very clearly spells out all the answers, the beauty here is in the ambiguity.
Personally, I like gritty, messy, vicious, beautiful, painful, or powerful representations of relationships. Everyone Knows How Much I Love You is a novel about female friendship in NYC, to a point. However, this isn't a romanticized post-Sex In the City vision of sisters out there empowering each other and clinking martinis.
Time and the passage of years fundamentally alters all relationships. Just like matter, friendships are subject to entropy and become more complicated as the collective history piles up.
The book rolls out in four non-linear phases, occuring in 1999, 2012, sometime in 2015-2016, and 2020. Even though there were plenty of clues, I didn't realize until the very end that the 2012 sections were not the narrator's current time. The whole story is told while looking in the rearview mirror. Given the influence of the Arrow of Time in our memories, it makes sense why all the chaotic actions of previous days seem so ordered and sensible to Rose.
Usually the reader isn't privy to the inner dialogue of the bad girl. Even when toxic friendships are told so perfectly, like in [b:The Robber Bride|17650|The Robber Bride|Margaret Atwood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388263287l/17650._SY75_.jpg|1119196] by [a:Margaret Atwood|3472|Margaret Atwood|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1282859073p2/3472.jpg] what makes the terrible friend tick isn't the focus. Here we see and hear Rose's motivations for consistently putting everyone on a collision course with annihilation. I never cheered Rose on, but there were points where I could see how she justified her own terrible actions.
I saw Rose described a few places as an unreliable narrator. Everyone telling a story about their past is unreliable, so that's perhaps misleading. The only way unreliable fits is if Rose herself willfully abandoned or warped the facts for a better story.
This is possible, as her editor kept urging her to punch up the details, create a character with a mental map, etc. Perhaps she did that and we are simply reading a work of fiction about a work of fiction. Going down that road may be a little out there, but technically the Lacie/Ian roommate situation was predicated on a ton of coincidence. It's possible only the 1999 section is based in anything real.
Many summaries centered on the "envy" and "jealousy" aspects of Rose and Lacie. But to be envious is to want what someone else has for your own. Rose's real desire appears to be complete dominion over Lacie. She wanted, consciously or not, to leave her with nowhere else to turn for comfort, emotional connection, and sexual release.
Rose isn't the stereotypic jealous girlfriend either. She's a power-hungry annihilator. Even in 2020, remorse is absent. Instead, Rose believes she protected Lacie from betrayal and abandonment at each turn.
Neither does Rose seem particularly angry at Ian for his emotional rejection after intense sexual connection. She's really angry at Lacie for reconnecting with a guy who cheats. That overarching lack of impulse control halts Rose from having a healthy relationship with anyone, and also puts the people closest to her in a ring of fire.
In the end, this distinction is what hooked me. McCarthy doesn't give us an easy Mean Girls II story. Instead, we get to peek inside the mind of a brilliant, damaged, obsessive woman for a while. One who has motives likely hidden even to herself. Unlike many of the books I read where the author very clearly spells out all the answers, the beauty here is in the ambiguity.