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Given that novels are routinely touted as the new version of some previous chartbuster, Almost Life will doubtless be heralded as One Day meets Normal People for a sexually fluid generation. Featuring romantic indecisions spanning many years and an unironic take on the youthful psyche, it already reads as familiar.
The novel opens in Paris in 1978 with a moment of affinity on the steps of Sacré-Coeur when students Laure Boutin and Erica Parker first glimpse each other, and then teases the reader with more than 400 pages of will-they-won’t-they misunderstandings, ecstasies and sorrows. This is a tale of missed chances, of the choices we make, and of queer and bisexual love in different social climates.
With her “slightly terrifying aura”, uncompromising Parisian Laure “hadn’t expected to meet an angel on the basilica’s steps”. Erica, six years younger, gauche and beautiful, presents as the nervous English tourist she is. Supposedly straight, she is spending the summer in France before starting uni, whereas Laure is a queer seducer who treats her conquests with comparatively little emotion. Until Erica swings into view. Coup de foudre.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning children’s and historical novelist, and Paris in the late 1970s is rendered convincingly but at a length which, along with an abundance of drunken philosophical discourse, mars the pace. Erica is soon pulled into the boho-on-a-budget world of Laure and her intellectual friends, with all its art, literature, bar crawls and theorising. The two women are in love, although they manage to taint the ardour with classic youthful paranoia and over-interpretation. Laure is developing a problem with alcohol, and Erica is struggling with sexuality and self-doubt. Now, and ever after, she plays “versions of her life on fast forward, staying, not staying”.
Erica returns to Norfolk, and Laure loses her beloved best friend Michel to a disease that for a long time can’t be diagnosed as the Aids crisis hits. Bisexual Erica knows “she could not live how Laure and her friends lived, at the edges of things … loving Laure would not be simple”. Erica dates men and then a woman at UEA, and one of the novel’s longueurs begins, with inconsequential details and studenty conversations that would have benefited from a severe slash and burn.
The heart of Almost Life is the often thwarted love story between Laure and Erica, and all its joy and brilliant tension lies in the scenes between them rather than in the sections when their separate stories meander along at a maddeningly glacial pace while they write each other occasional letters. However, the obstacles to them being together are real and convincing, avoiding the navel-gazing vacillations of some contemporary sad girl lit.
One of the beauties of this novel is that both women are profoundly real and flawed, Erica with her sometimes egotistical selfishness and Laure with her addictions and inflexibility. Erica, who is “so tangled in her self-indulgent, stupid fantasies, her plots for revenge”, sometimes thinks she is “playing at lesbians with Laure”, and yet she knows in her heart that their love runs much deeper, at a time when homosexual and heterosexual lifestyles were largely incompatible. The path less travelled is not for Erica, and yet her mind never leaves it.
Having made their wavering choices, “this other truth existed, where she and Erica were. Had been, for all these years.” Despite one obvious queer character trope near the end, the novel does become increasingly propulsive: sensitive, sad, multilayered, and a moving examination of true love and passion. Millwood Hargrave’s first adult novel, The Mercies, was an instant bestseller in 2020. This updating of a theme looks all set to become a gen Z hit.
