I use duckduckgo.com for my online searches. According to Urban Dictionary, ghosting in dating is, “When a person cuts off all communication with their friends or the person they’re dating, with zero warning or notice beforehand. You’ll mostly see them avoiding friend’s phone calls, social media, and avoiding them in public.” Hence “being ghosted.”
Recently, I listened to an interview with Rosie Walsh, and the interviewer mentioned the incredibly way Walsh describes emotions of love, happiness, and heartbreak. I wanted to read such descriptions in successful contemporary novels.
Many people around me don’t know the word “ghosted.” It is a terrific word, which describes so well experiences of unmarried women trying to meet that final man for once, so the relationship lasts and doesn’t disappear in a split of a second. I talked with aged women as well. Without exception, they told me how many times they experienced that. I don’t know why I felt the need to point out each time: “Married women wouldn’t know about that.” Maybe because married women were around when I mentioned the word. Some of these women had been married for decades. To my surprise, the openness of the unmarried women made me uncomfortable while married women participated in the conversation.
Back to the book.
The experience of being “ghosted” in this book, however, is unique. The story includes a few twists, mystery, some tensions. Few ghosted women would wonder if the men died and that’s why they might have disappeared. Susan, the heroine of this book, wonders a lot about such a possibility.
In real life, while angry and disappointed, women seem to accept that they had the experience of a man ghosting them, and not only once.
As I started reading the book, I felt annoyed and told Susan to let it go. Only my curiosity about what young women like reading nowadays kept me going.
The book is a romance novel. Not the cheap-quality category available on supermarket shelves. It belongs to what I would call a literary novel quality.
However, it floats almost between the two styles. Yes, Walsh captures and describes some emotions very well. She also captures very well the refusal to let it go, the persistence to want to understand the “why?”, the obsession with reviewing every detail of the seven-day blissful encounter. All women went through such phases from time to time, after a relationship suddenly disintegrated, especially when that relationship was apart from any other.
I was wondering if I could advise a male friend to read it, and whether he would enjoy it. I don’t think so.
In the end, it reads like a Hollywood feel-good script. The book has been very successful.
Still, I think that Walsh will end up with remarkable good novels. Just one more step up.
eachword-eachday 