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Irish Examiner
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Distorted view of reality is a common theme
In Marni Appleton's short story Positive Vibes, Lia sees girls sitting at the tables outside the café where she works 'phones in hands, hunched over themselves as though they'd like to fold up flat and slip away entirely'. The scene encapsulates how technology dominates and diminishes the characters throughout Appleton's promising short story collection, I Hope You're Happy. On a school tour, girls ostracise a classmate by cropping her from a group photo so that 'only her arm remained, strung up in thin air like a dead thing'. A woman who becomes obsessed with a work colleague after a sexual encounter checks his Facebook page and Twitter feed every day to forge a sense of closeness with him. In the title story, Chloe intentionally doesn't block her estranged confidant Ana from her social media profiles because Chloe wants her posts to demonstrate that the dissolution of their friendship hasn't dented the vivacity of her life — and knows Ana is addicted to using the apps. The collection's 11 stories are mostly populated by millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Zers (born between 1997 and 2012). All Appleton's protagonists are female. The English author presents us with a glimpse of sexually fluid, uncertain, and hedonistic characters. Some snort cocaine off the back of their iPhones while others engage in threesomes. They're often in precarious employment, overwhelmed ('Doing nothing…no longer seemed an option'), and tentatively trying to negotiate the complications of strained relationships and rapidly-evolving social mores. They believe in manifesting and, perhaps inevitably, one of the book's epigraphs is from Taylor Swift ('Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first'). Appleton's writing has appeared in the Irish literary journal Banshee, among others. Shifting between the first and third person, her stories forensically dissect the subtle power dynamics of relationships and are frequently embossed with striking images. For instance, a teenager waiting outside a station sees her mother's white Toyota Prius among a cluster of black cabs as a 'swan in a huddle of ducklings'. That observation comes from the narrator, Allie, of Road Trip, a story that illuminates an important theme in the collection: Appleton's depiction of outsiders at the centre of her stories. In a frightening chronicle of neglect, Allie's irascible mother punishes Allie by shoving her out of a stationary car onto the side of the road and then drives away. 'No one is expecting me anywhere,' the narrator believes as she walks towards home. 'No one is expecting anything from me.' If the men in this collection are portrayed as, at best, virtue signallers and, at worst, perpetrators of coercive control, some of the female characters are equally adept at sabotaging one of their own. Female friends turn 'inward' to exclude a disloyal classmate for kissing the boyfriend of a group member before they deliver their misogynistic judgement on the betrayal: 'it's so much worse when a girl does it.' Body image is a recurring anxiety in the book and receives its most articulate expression in The Mirror Test. Melissa concedes she is always looking at herself in any available surface — a phone screen, a mirror, a train window — but doesn't recognise the person in the reflection. 'She is cruel and detached … It is true people hate her — that's the price she pays — but their envy, a weight, also lights her up.' The stories anatomise how technology and, particularly, social media distort its characters' view of themselves, but the collection also emphasises their culpability in this degradation. 'I know that anything I've lost,' one character suggests, 'has been given away freely.' Read More Book review: Do not put this book on hold
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
I Hope You're Happy by Marni Appleton review – a darkly comic look at millennial womanhood
Marni Appleton's bittersweet debut collection of short stories focuses on the experiences of millennial women – their obsessions, friendships, betrayals and crushes. Appleton is good on mother-daughter relationships. In the title story, Ana is alienated by the realisation that everyone around her is pregnant. As she obsesses about the breakdown of her friendship with Chloe, tormented by her upbeat social media posts, we realise there is more going on: Ana is projecting her pain about her bipolar mother and conflicted emotions about having children. In Road Trip, 17-year-old Allie hangs out with older friends. Her mother's coldness is palpable when she picks up her hungover daughter. Driving home, they have to stop so Allie can vomit. Left there by her mother, Allie recalls other incidents of maternal cruelty: 'How bad do you have to be to be rejected by the person whose body was your first home?' Positive Vibes explores how social media erodes one's confidence and sense of identity. Lia, an art student, works in a coffee shop. She becomes obsessed with Sara, a local influencer, and her Instagram posts advocating positivity: 'Like having a friend in your pocket.' When Lia realises that Cora, fellow barista and art graduate, has stolen one of her ideas and posted it on Insta (gaining prized followers), Lia's meltdown is excruciating and darkly comic. The curse of social media is everywhere in the 11 tales: the scrutiny, the need to perform, the desire for 'likes', and relentless fear of being blocked. This is best exemplified in Shut Your Mouth: when photos of women eating go viral, the sale of voiles, mouth coverings, soar. Appleton's wry observational style is well suited to these tales of young women navigating the modern world. She writes with empathy for her vulnerable protagonists, conveying their inner conflicts and deceptions. I Hope You're Happy by Marni Appleton is published by Indigo Press (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
