(courtesy Allen & Unwin)
This will hardly come as a news flash to anyone but life rarely lives up hype and expectation.
When we’re younger, we expect bounteous riches, if not material then at the very least existential, to flow down upon us like confetti at an environmentally unsound wedding, but as life goes on it becomes clear while good things can happen, they rarely live up our breathlessly exultant sense of anticipation.
No one knows that better than Sophie Collins, the Essex-based protagonist of Sara Pascoe’s hilariously sad Christmas-set novel Weirdo, who has long abandoned any sense that life will work out as planned.
That’s not to say she’s mired in misery and sadness, although life is not exactly a fun-filled, fireworks-at-midnight party, but she’s accepted that being a bar worker on minimum wage with considerable debts, no real friends to speak of, a coldly indifferent, know-it-all boyfriend, and a family who are prickly at best, is pretty much the best she’s going to do.
She is, as you might expect, shuffling through life, burdened not only by life’s dice being rolled against her but by defense mechanisms which may have served a purpose at one point but which know hold her down from actually making any changes in her life, emboldened by a mindset that sees the worst of things in some sort of twisted positive light because overdone rationalisation is pretty all she has left in her life-coping armoury.
I’m a zombie scarer. A ghost of the night before haunting the high street. I’m very very sorry. I don’t know why I do this. I should’ve gone for one drink then gone home like a normal person with a nice life who doesn’t make all this mess and smell so bad in the morning.
Told in the first person with disarming honesty and sizeable amount of delusion which is gradually whittled down as Sophie slowly and haphazardly learns some valuable life lessons, Weirdo is the sort of story that engages from the word go, both because it adroitly mixes vibrant humour with grim life reality, and because Sophie, for all her flaws and foibles, actually wants something good from life.
Saddled with Ian who seems to play the part of the attentive boyfriend reasonably well at first until he doesn’t, refusing sex and any kind of intimacy like its some of toxic ticking bomb and espousing the kind of mansplaining philophisical bent that seems insightful until you realise it’s quite condescendingly cruel, Sophie wants love in the same way any of us do.
So since she doesn’t have it with Ian, though she keeps trying to convince herself, with ever-declining levels of effectiveness that she does, she focuses on Chris, a guy she knew from a previous job on the buses who seemed handsome and mysterious and who might be the answer to all of mangled prayers (Sophie wants good things but doesn’t quite know what they look like so her hopes and dreams tend to look a big bedraggled as a consequence).
She goes so far as to follow him to Australia, an act of stalkery indulgence that simply serves to get her in debt and to dissuade from Chris as a fantasy alternative to her current life and romantic woes; that is until he walks into her life again at the pub she’s working on and she seizes, like a starving person alighting on a mould-soaked piece of bread, on his reappearance as a sign that things are finally turning around.
(courtesy Faber & Faber)
Reader, they are not, but dear, sweet, thoroughly deluded Sophie, whose childhood scars are actually involved in giving her new adult ones, can’t see this.
Small snippets of epiphany do not sneak through but they don’t take hold, at least not at first and Sophie, rather maddeningly and disappointingly at times, does quite take on the lessons these fleeting insights could impart if she just paid attention.
But here’s the thing, and it’s what makes Weirdo so rewarding to read; while you may read sections of Sophie’s travails and shake your head at the fact that she can’t get her collective together, the reality is that she’s just like all of us, to greater or lesser extents.
We want life exactly as advertised but we all self-sabotage in some ways, and while many of us are self aware enough to see where we’re failing and to glean some life lessons, we don’t always know what to do with them, influenced by past fears, anxiety or a hold host of things that keep key insights into becoming life-turning epiphanies.
Sophie is, in other words, an Everyperson, and while much of what happens to her is heightened for comic effect by a writer who knows funny, the underlying humanity is never lost and we see that Sophie is, like all of us, eager for good things but unable, much of the time, to let go of the bad.
After school I thought that acting could be my thing, because it’s about pretending to be someone else. That seemed to be the key. Everything that’s so shit about me wouldn’t be in the characters – I could escape it and have none of myself left and that would make me probably the best actor in the world.
And that’s what makes Weirdo such a refreshing read.
It is magnificently well-realised and highly readable journey through one much put-upon person and who they take past hurts and disappointments and fashion a life that doesn’t quite work as she wants, and who get glimpses of what to do next or what she should avoid at least but who is manifestly unable to translate them into effective change.
In-between laughing out loud or being tremendously moved, with the extremes working brilliantly together all the way through, you will identify with and want to embrace Sophie because she simply wants what we all want and like us, is hampered in her ability to make it all cohesively and emotionally satisfyingly come together.
She is saddled by some strange ideas such as her mother being able to see through their cat or by an inability to keep internal thoughts from escaping into the big, bad world, and of course, all the range of hurts each of us carry through life, and it’s that unadorned, humourously and affectingly expressed humanity that make Weirdo something really special.
It doesn’t always hit the mark and there are times when you will groan with frustration at how wrong Sophie gets it – you will also cheer, when over one Christmas and ensuing months she starts, little bit by little bit to get it right, or at least, start getting it right – but mostly and rewardingly Weirdo does nail what it’s like to want life to be as brilliantly good as supposed, to fudge every attempt to make that happen and to fumble around until finally lessons are learned, with some real pain and sorrow, if not perfectly, then at least well enough for life to be better than it was and on its way to something approaching what the heart has always desired.