First, I know there are some readers who need to know whether the dog is okay more than they need to avoid spoilers. Same, my friends. Same. If that’s you, the answer is waiting for you in the P.S. at the bottom.
Moving on, PYG by Pip Landers-Letts is a cosy sapphic romance, and one that I enjoyed. It mainly centres around Alice, age forty-two and newly single, fresh from a relationship that left so many marks on her psyche that she’s still trying to identify them all. We start out on what’s undoubtedly the worst night of her year, when she finds an unconscious old man lying in a dark road. She stuffs him unceremoniously into her Ford Fiesta and brings him to the hospital. What follows is biscuits, banter, a slow-burn attraction with the A&E doctor, and a dog by the fire. If that’s your jam, then here are my four stars; go get this one, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
That summary isn’t the whole story, though, and it’s not really what I carried away from this book.
I’m sort of my family’s genealogist. In our case, at least for one side of the family tree, this amounts to a grand word for someone who stares at a bunch of gaps where actual history should be. The records I need the most were either never kept (quite on purpose), or they were “kept” by institutions that had reasons to fabricate facts or leave things out. Much of what I’ve inherited is like outlines on a wall when and old photograph gets taken down: the suggestion of a presence, but not the presence itself.
This all means that when a book turns out to also really be about who keeps the records of a life, I notice it. PYG is that kind of book, wearing a romcom’s cardigan.
The aforementioned old man spends the early chapters as not much more than a hospital-room whiteboard with a blank identity on it. By hospital protocol, he’s Patient X, as if the letter represents the place where his name has been crossed out.
In the novel’s second timeline, set mid-century and told in a young boy’s voice, we witness some of the ways by which a person gets erased in the first place: institutions that could keep their story decide not to tell it, relatives who hold their l*etters and decide which reach their destinations.
About the only thing the boy is permitted to keep is the dog.
The only things that tend to survive of anyone in this novel are what somebody else bothers to save or say on their behalf: a voicemail, or pencil marks on a flyleaf.
Alice’s timeline runs through a similar list of questions. Her recovery from too long under the thumb of a controlling partner is itemised in things like shoes that sank her into overdraft fees and a phone she didn’t buy for herself.
Landers-Letts understands that freedom has a price tag, and that the price falls hardest on women who weren’t given the receipts in case they needed to make returns. To me, watching Alice repossess her own life one object at a time is the book’s true romance. The doctor, bless her, mostly gets to hold the clipboard… and this is coming from someone who enjoyed reading their relationship the whole time!
There are some places where the book stumbles. The jumps between Alice’s comic tragedies and the boy’s chapters can be as jarring as a missed gear shift, and all the resolutions arrive right on schedule. If I hadn’t had a running measure of how much book was left, I might have been surprised it was over when it ended—the last act mends in days what the book spent three hundred pages tearing apart. When this book wants to break your heart, it hands you another object; when it needs to mend one, it delivers a speech. The objects are better.
I’m also not normally a fan of endings that usher each sorrow into its proper room and turn down the bed, but I also accept that the cosy genre comes with a covenant to console. As such, I’ll hold the haste against the ending and not the warmth.
This might be a book for you if you want a heroine who (like many of us) is long past coming out and still gloriously a mess, or if you’re someone who rebuilt a life one replaced object at a time. Skip it if you need your plot beats less signposted, or if coercive control hits too close to home.
P.S. (spoilers about dogs): there are two dogs, one per timeline. The animal death content warning belongs to the past. You’ll be scared for what’s on-page, but it isn’t what it looks like; the real death happens off-page, years later. The present-day dog, the one by the fire, is fine. She is, honestly, doing the best of anyone. You can go back up and read the rest now, if that’s why you’re down here.
Content Warnings: coercive control, emotional abuse, child abandonment, institutional abuse, off-screen animal death
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