I never know what I’m going to get next from Mary McCoy, which is one of the things that keeps drawing me back to her work. From her pen I’ve read a retelling of cutthroat ancient Roman politics set in the world of high school student councils (I, Claudia), a quirky, genre-bending summer camp adventure (Camp So-and-So), and now Indestructible Object, a coming-of-age tale about a teen podcaster untangling the messiness of love. Authors who consistently deliver great works in one genre and style are wonderful, but there’s also a particular pleasure to following an author across the literary landscape because you trust in their skill as a storyteller, which is what I enjoy about McCoy’s body of work.
Indestructible Object, McCoy’s most recent release, begins with an ending. Lee Swan (named after photographer Lee Miller and not Robert E. Lee, as she emphasizes) and her boyfriend, Vincent, have hosted the podcast Artists in Love for two years, exploring the passionate and tumultuous relationships between real-life artists. Lee has her future planned out; now that she’s graduated high school, she’ll stay in Memphis for college, study sound design, and live out her own artistic love with Vincent. Even her parents’s recent announcement of their separation hasn’t thrown her off-track.
Until their next episode of Artists in Love takes a surprising and personal turn when Vincent breaks up with her on air.
Reeling, Lee tries to make sense of the turmoil her life has become through the way she knows best: making another podcast. Recruiting Max, the son of family friends, and Risa, a cute new musician acquaintance. As Lee tries to make sense of her own complicated love life, she finds herself trying to make sense of the other love story that’s come to an end: that of her parents. Why did they choose to spend their lives together and raise a daughter? Was it out of love, or merely convenience? And if it was love, where did that love go?
Indestructible Object is a book about messiness and uncertainty. It’s about, weird, transitional times of life, like the summer between the end of high school and the start of college or the time after your parents have announced a divorce but before they’ve actually split up. Lee herself is a flawed and complicated character–deeply driven and passionate, but also judgmental, indecisive, and prone to tunnel vision. She loves her hometown of Memphis with its quirks and culture, but can be oblivious to its faults. She’s bisexual and loved her boyfriend deeply, but also repeatedly cheated on him with a girl and never told him. She’s not always an easy character to like, but she felt very real and nuanced to me.
Indestructible Object also engages with bisexuality in a way that is just as messy and complicated as the rest of it. Lee—raised in a community of supportive counter-culture artists but not really out or engaged with the local queer community, prone to falling hard and wanting a lot, a repeat cheater on her boyfriend—is a type of character who flirts with a lot of “bad bisexual” stereotypes, like being promiscuous or noncommittal. But she also exists within a broader tapestry of tangled love stories and identities that make it clear her messiness is more of a symptom of being human rather than because of her sexuality.
At one point, Lee expresses her frustration that her behavior is seen as representative of her identity in a way that is never pinned on straight people, something that is supported enough by the novel and the range of characters experiencing regret, heartache, and indecision, so to me she ultimately came off as a real, multi-faceted character rather than a biphobic stereotype.
Max, Lee’s friend and podcast accomplice, is also queer in a way that media often doesn’t touch on—after identifying as gay, he’s broken up with his long-term boyfriend and is dating a girl for the first time, a reversal of typical queer realizations and something that people in the novel have trouble wrapping their mind around. Both characters represent a bisexual story that I haven’t seen much of in fiction, which added some interesting layers.
I’m also personally a sucker for an epistolary narrative, and I really enjoyed the way that Indestructible Object includes Lee’s podcasting in the narrative. Interspersed between first-person prose are transcripts of Artists in Love (at the start) and Lee’s newer podcast, Indestructible Object (through the rest of the novel). In the past, I’ve found that novels incorporating screenplay or transcripts can undermine the greatest strength a novel has to offer, which is offering emotional insight and narration between dialogue, but I found that Indestructible Object works in the transcripts of Lee’s podcast very successfully. McCoy digs deep into the emotional and technical labor of making the podcast, from the literal work like sound mixing to theme music to less-tangible efforts like prying the truth out of closed-lipped interviewees and the narrow knife’s edge between honesty and exploitation.
If I could sum up what I enjoyed so much about Indestructible Object, it would be its specificity. Lee feels incredibly well-formed and flawed as the protagonist, and so does the web of friends, family, and love interests that surround her. Her artistic role models and the setting add some wonderfully specific texture to the story.
Much like a good nonfiction podcast, a good fiction novel can feel like an expertly crafted and immersive slice a particular world that captures detail and emotion, and Indestructible Object does this very well. I can’t wait to see what else Mary McCoy will have in store for her readers.
Content warnings: explorations of divorce, cheating, anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice, and racism
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