How many people can seriously sympathize with this, particularly in a twentysomething? Honestly, Lucy, if this is the biggest problem you can dredge up, you have it pretty good.īut don’t worry, Lucy can dredge up more problems! These have to do with the fact that she and John decide to have a wedding (as opposed to getting married at city hall) because Lucy is afraid to defy her parents’ wishes. Oh, thank God Lucy got proposed to while she was still 29! Can you imagine if she had made it to 30 still single?!? To be fair, Lucy doesn’t allude to her age in this way, but she does make it seem as if her four years of relative singlehood were one of the worst experiences a person could ever have ever. At the end of the four years, John comes around to Lucy’s feelings about kids and proposes immediately. Lucy then spends four years dating around, including a brief relationship with a delightful Swedish dude who she kicks to the curb because she needs her space.

At the beginning, we learn Lucy and her beloved boyfriend John had broken up because they disagreed about whether to have kids. Unfortunately, this book has all of the problems typical of Knisley’s work, without much else to make it appealing. However, I recently read Displacement (2015) and thought it was a little better in this regard, so I was prepared to give Something New a try. I thought 2014’s An Age of License was her worst offender to date, and it made me reluctant to read subsequent books.

The problems she does talk about are usually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, and as a result she often comes off, to me, as entitled and whiny, and her books can be unsatisfyingly callow. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need to know every gory detail of a writer’s life, but I feel like Knisley alludes to heavier things-depression in her family, her parents’ divorce, the (apparently not great) way her father treats his girlfriends-and then quickly dashes back to something less interesting, something that goes down more easily and is as facile as a not-very-good TV drama. My reviews of Lucy Knisley’s previous works have revealed some ambivalence on my part: She’s great when writing about travel or food, but at a certain point a little more emotional investment is required, by both the writer/artist and the reader.

Something New by Lucy Knisley