A will-they-won’t-they story with a nostalgic twist on the noughties – The Irish Times

I love you, I love you, I love you

author: Laura Dockrill

ISBN-13: 978-0008586911

editor: headquarters

Guide price: 16,99 €

Last September, comedian Monica Heisey released her debut novel, Really Good Actually. It was a fictionalized story about her divorce in her late twenties. Reading Laura Dockrill’s debut novel for adults, I had the same feelings I had reading Heisey’s work. I wish both authors had simply written memoirs.

Dockrill’s novel follows the friendship and tender romance of Ella and Lowe from their early teens to their mid-thirties. It’s a will-they, won’t-they story, tinged with 2000s nostalgia, that’s closely tied to the author’s personal experience of the “pain and joy of first love.”

In many ways, I am Dockrill’s perfect reader; a single thirty-something millennial consumed by youthful lust. I am a fan of love stories that fight against the odds and have the ability to pine like a 15-year-old who has just returned from the Gaeltacht with his first heartbreak.

When Lowe praises Ella’s writing as “lively,” he is absolutely right. Dockrill’s career as a young adult author is reflected in her lively prose, full of exclamation marks, superlatives, and capital letters.

“My body is pancake batter and with its heat, jeeezzzz, I am Cook Crêpes here. The chemistry is… UFF.”

But if this is the strength of her writing, it is also a weakness. Dockrill’s instinct to guide and protect her reader manifests itself in an overuse of metaphor, in too much telling and too little showing.

“We are no longer silky smooth and supple. We start to stick to the bottom of the pan. floor. To become cumbersome. And it would not be long before we burn.”

What makes the prose work is Dockrill’s obvious affection for her characters (they represent the author and her now husband, after all). Hers is a tender portrayal of an enduring teenage love that never loses the spark of youthful desire.

Fictionalizing the truth can be effective, as in Michael Magee’s extraordinary novel Close to Home. What is important is that the text still maintains the authenticity and complexity of real feelings. In this case, Dockrill’s decision seems to have been driven by an instinct to protect herself and her own story. The problem, then, is not fictionalizing the truth, but withholding it.