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The Answers
An urgent, propulsive novel about a woman learning to negotiate her ailment and its various aftereffects via the simulacrum of a perfect romantic relationship
In Catherine Lacey’s ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the “Girlfriend Experiment,� the brainchild of an eccentric actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship—even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the “Emotional Girlfriend”—certainly better than the “Anger Girlfriend� or the “Maternal Girlfriend”—and is pulled into Kurt’s ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection.
Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey. It is a gorgeous hybrid of the plot- and the idea-driven novel that will leave you reeling.
In Catherine Lacey’s ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the “Girlfriend Experiment,� the brainchild of an eccentric actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship—even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the “Emotional Girlfriend”—certainly better than the “Anger Girlfriend� or the “Maternal Girlfriend”—and is pulled into Kurt’s ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection.
Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey. It is a gorgeous hybrid of the plot- and the idea-driven novel that will leave you reeling.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published June 6, 2017
364 people are currently reading
13k people want to read
About the author
Catherine Lacey
26books1,307followersCatherine Lacey is the author of five books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, as well as a story collection, Certain American States.
Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in México.
Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in México.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 811 reviews
December 9, 2023
Life is too short for this.
December 2, 2017
I understand cerebral, I understand provocative. I also understand too much plot that turns into an unpalatable stew of bizarre characters who appear and disappear, unexplained motivations, a protagonist who is only tangentially involved in her own life. Just no. Too many ingredients. Whatever appeal and flavor they held on their own is lost. As was whatever grand theme about life, love and personhood some would like to say this was about.
June 28, 2017
Wow, I loved this book. I knew from the opening page that I would. Sometimes you find writers who seem to get you or speak to you on a level that just makes sense, and that's how I feel about Catherine Lacey. The Answers is my ideal kind of novel: quirky, witty, intellectually stimulating and deeply character-driven—yet there's still an actual plot carrying it forward.
Is it possible to achieve a prolonged state of limerence—the physiological and psychological stage of a body as it falls in love? Does there exist a person who will meet one's every needs? Is there such thing as a perfect relationship? Mary Parsons has been selected to participate in an experiment that seeks to answer these questions. She—along with several other women—will each play a separate girlfriend role for the wealthy actor funding the experiment. And Mary's role is arguably most important of all: Emotional Girlfriend.
For Mary, whose life is in a state of stagnant listlessness as she falls further into debt paying for strange new methods to treat her chronic pain condition, the Girlfriend Experiment (as its aptly named) is an opportunity to make some easy money. The irony of it all is that Mary is actually a rather emotionally detached person, and most of the novel is spent inside her analytical mind.
The Answers could have easily become trite, as many novels that explore the issue of love inevitably do, but in Lacey's capable hands, this one transcends the predictable cliches. It implores readers to question more than just the how of making love last, but the very reasons why we seek romantic connections in the first place—and what that might tell us about who we are.
We may never be able to completely know another person, but we'll always have ourselves. If we can learn to be okay with that, and if we're willing to accept the uncertainty of human relationships and the gaps and distances that will always exist between two people, maybe we'll come to find that that's enough.
Fans of Miranda July, Alexandra Kleeman and Lydia Millet will likely enjoy this one as much as I did.
Is it possible to achieve a prolonged state of limerence—the physiological and psychological stage of a body as it falls in love? Does there exist a person who will meet one's every needs? Is there such thing as a perfect relationship? Mary Parsons has been selected to participate in an experiment that seeks to answer these questions. She—along with several other women—will each play a separate girlfriend role for the wealthy actor funding the experiment. And Mary's role is arguably most important of all: Emotional Girlfriend.
For Mary, whose life is in a state of stagnant listlessness as she falls further into debt paying for strange new methods to treat her chronic pain condition, the Girlfriend Experiment (as its aptly named) is an opportunity to make some easy money. The irony of it all is that Mary is actually a rather emotionally detached person, and most of the novel is spent inside her analytical mind.
The Answers could have easily become trite, as many novels that explore the issue of love inevitably do, but in Lacey's capable hands, this one transcends the predictable cliches. It implores readers to question more than just the how of making love last, but the very reasons why we seek romantic connections in the first place—and what that might tell us about who we are.
We may never be able to completely know another person, but we'll always have ourselves. If we can learn to be okay with that, and if we're willing to accept the uncertainty of human relationships and the gaps and distances that will always exist between two people, maybe we'll come to find that that's enough.
Fans of Miranda July, Alexandra Kleeman and Lydia Millet will likely enjoy this one as much as I did.
January 31, 2018
Nevermind the answers, I couldn’t figure out the fucking QUESTIONS.
June 18, 2017
30-year-old Mary is broke and sick. Though nobody has been able to diagnose her illness, she is weak, underweight, and beset by constant, chronic pain. She's recently discovered a method that, miraculously, seems to help, makes her feel almost normal again � an esoteric form of treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, or 'PAKing' � but it's prohibitively expensive. Mary is also on the run from her past, having fled her fervently religious parents, who brought her up in near-total isolation from every aspect of modern society. The experience has left its marks on her: she's still unusual in certain ways that make her a curiosity in a place like New York City, for example a limited understanding of popular culture. It's this last quality that makes her particularly attractive to Matheson, who interviews her for an 'income-generating experience'.
The job, it turns out, is acting as one of a series of Girlfriends (yes, the capital G is important) to Kurt Sky, an A-list actor/writer/producer/director. The overall project is called the Girlfriend Experiment; Mary is to play the role of Emotional Girlfriend. (There's also an Anger Girlfriend for arguments, a Maternal Girlfriend to fuss over Kurt, an Intellectual Girlfriend for in-depth conversation, even a Mundanity Girlfriend to sit around like human wallpaper. As for sex, that's the job of the Intimacy Team.) Kurt has mixed reasons for commissioning the experiment: he's obscenely rich, he's bored and creatively blocked, his meditation counsellor said it would be a 'healing experience' for him, 'but what he was really trying to do was help make a discovery that would help others, deeply alter the world'. What if the disordered emotional reactions within a relationship could be broken down, segregated, and thus perfected? Can the problem of romantic love, all its hysteria and destructiveness, be solved?
What Lacey does with this premise is a strange sort of alchemy: the very essence of what it is to be human seems to be woven into the fabric of her novel. Its perspicacity is entirely out of proportion to the high-concept setup, and Mary's tentative attempts to understand human behaviour � all of it as alien to her as though she actually were from another planet � are written with impossible lightness. This, I think, is what makes The Answers magic. If it's not always easy to believe that Mary knows so little about celebrities and films and TV after over a decade in NYC, it doesn't matter when the specifics of her situation allow her such unique insights, naive and profound at the same time, about love and relationships. Her observations are so clean and sharp yet somehow spiritual, suggesting a elevated level of understanding that's also a little askew, a little unearthly.
Take the very first line (how could you not read on?):
There was at least one morning I was certain, though only for a few hours, that everything that could ever really happen to me had already happened.
Or this perfectly evocative description of something really innocuous:
Voices from the street slipped in the window above her mattress. A sad woman was telling a story, voice thick from weeping, half her words too melted to hear, as another woman soberly consoled. Mary put the phone down and tried to listen � it was something about a guy, something about two weeks ago and Facebook and it's like she doesn't even know me and a text, a lost sweater or some lost days or something else lost � Mary couldn't be sure. Did her listening have any effect on the woman? Did the woman feel how her story, however incomplete, was landing somewhere? Something about listening from a distance, drowsy in bed and in the dark, made Mary's caring feel so pure.
I just loved everything about the way The Answers was written and put together from start to finish. It's broken into three parts, and is one of those books in which the writing is so consistently good that after the end of the first part, I felt bereft to be leaving Mary's point of view behind, and after the end of the second, I felt exactly the same about the third-person narration. There seems to be more and more fiction like this around* � I saw a bit of Alexandra Kleeman in Mary's inexplicable condition and the weirdness of PAKing, a bit of Luke Kennard's in the corporate surrealism of the Girlfriend Experiment, a bit of Jen George's stories in both � and I couldn't be happier.
(*Though there seems to be a common theme of blurbs for books like this really not doing them justice or pinning down what's great about them. Neither of the official descriptions (US and UK) for The Answers makes it sound half as good as it actually is.)
| | |
The job, it turns out, is acting as one of a series of Girlfriends (yes, the capital G is important) to Kurt Sky, an A-list actor/writer/producer/director. The overall project is called the Girlfriend Experiment; Mary is to play the role of Emotional Girlfriend. (There's also an Anger Girlfriend for arguments, a Maternal Girlfriend to fuss over Kurt, an Intellectual Girlfriend for in-depth conversation, even a Mundanity Girlfriend to sit around like human wallpaper. As for sex, that's the job of the Intimacy Team.) Kurt has mixed reasons for commissioning the experiment: he's obscenely rich, he's bored and creatively blocked, his meditation counsellor said it would be a 'healing experience' for him, 'but what he was really trying to do was help make a discovery that would help others, deeply alter the world'. What if the disordered emotional reactions within a relationship could be broken down, segregated, and thus perfected? Can the problem of romantic love, all its hysteria and destructiveness, be solved?
What Lacey does with this premise is a strange sort of alchemy: the very essence of what it is to be human seems to be woven into the fabric of her novel. Its perspicacity is entirely out of proportion to the high-concept setup, and Mary's tentative attempts to understand human behaviour � all of it as alien to her as though she actually were from another planet � are written with impossible lightness. This, I think, is what makes The Answers magic. If it's not always easy to believe that Mary knows so little about celebrities and films and TV after over a decade in NYC, it doesn't matter when the specifics of her situation allow her such unique insights, naive and profound at the same time, about love and relationships. Her observations are so clean and sharp yet somehow spiritual, suggesting a elevated level of understanding that's also a little askew, a little unearthly.
Take the very first line (how could you not read on?):
There was at least one morning I was certain, though only for a few hours, that everything that could ever really happen to me had already happened.
Or this perfectly evocative description of something really innocuous:
Voices from the street slipped in the window above her mattress. A sad woman was telling a story, voice thick from weeping, half her words too melted to hear, as another woman soberly consoled. Mary put the phone down and tried to listen � it was something about a guy, something about two weeks ago and Facebook and it's like she doesn't even know me and a text, a lost sweater or some lost days or something else lost � Mary couldn't be sure. Did her listening have any effect on the woman? Did the woman feel how her story, however incomplete, was landing somewhere? Something about listening from a distance, drowsy in bed and in the dark, made Mary's caring feel so pure.
I just loved everything about the way The Answers was written and put together from start to finish. It's broken into three parts, and is one of those books in which the writing is so consistently good that after the end of the first part, I felt bereft to be leaving Mary's point of view behind, and after the end of the second, I felt exactly the same about the third-person narration. There seems to be more and more fiction like this around* � I saw a bit of Alexandra Kleeman in Mary's inexplicable condition and the weirdness of PAKing, a bit of Luke Kennard's in the corporate surrealism of the Girlfriend Experiment, a bit of Jen George's stories in both � and I couldn't be happier.
(*Though there seems to be a common theme of blurbs for books like this really not doing them justice or pinning down what's great about them. Neither of the official descriptions (US and UK) for The Answers makes it sound half as good as it actually is.)
| | |
April 13, 2019
A much more intense read then expected, my own senses were heightened throughout, keeping me deep in contemplation and it definitely got my brain ticking.
What this book reiterates is that the human condition is deeply complex. Love in particular something so hard to dissect, interestingly within the social experiment in this book it’s clear that it’s almost impossible to analyse or characterise. This book is definitely about ideas and challenging social conventions.
This is a difficult book to review due to it’s complex premise and a quick summary could even turn off a few readers as it almost put me off initially. I don’t imagine this book would work for everyone unless your a particular fan of speculative fiction. I wasn’t sure I would end up liking this book as much as I did and credit the author for her insightful writing her ability to get deep inside her protagonist thoughts and deliver a compelling, strange but ultimately very interesting story with a fitting ending, this book was completely mesmerising.
What this book reiterates is that the human condition is deeply complex. Love in particular something so hard to dissect, interestingly within the social experiment in this book it’s clear that it’s almost impossible to analyse or characterise. This book is definitely about ideas and challenging social conventions.
This is a difficult book to review due to it’s complex premise and a quick summary could even turn off a few readers as it almost put me off initially. I don’t imagine this book would work for everyone unless your a particular fan of speculative fiction. I wasn’t sure I would end up liking this book as much as I did and credit the author for her insightful writing her ability to get deep inside her protagonist thoughts and deliver a compelling, strange but ultimately very interesting story with a fitting ending, this book was completely mesmerising.
February 1, 2018
Basically, if you took Jennifer Egan's , gave it a handful of Valium, infused it with a dumbed-down version of , and inexplicably crossed it over with an entirely unrelated memoir about being raised entirely separate from society and then a second entirely unrelated memoir about an experience with alternative medicine, you would have The Answers.
There are flashes of intellectual shine here--the Egany parts--and there's a good enough short story about a mysterious, Safe-style ailment and its treatment coupled with a kind of interesting story about a young woman struggling to reconcile herself with the unusual upbringing she's left behind, but none of it comes together into anything coherent. Lacey herself almost seems to acknowledge that in the middle section, where we abruptly go from first-person POV with Mary to a roving third-person, semi-omni POV that takes in the novel's wider and even less plausible cast. Then the whole thing goes back to Mary and gradually peters out.
Mary was born Junia Stone, the only daughter of a man who decided to raise her in a completely isolated environment so she could live a pure Christian life and he could write a manifesto about how inherently good she is. Instead, she broke away as a teenager and went to live with her aunt, who renamed her and apparently socialized her so well that she was soon able to go to an Ivy League school, where she made one friend, a rich and eccentric girl named Chandra. Years later, when Mary's life has fallen apart and she's gotten massively in debt due to a mysterious debilitating illness that no medical treatment seems to solve, Chandra introduces her to the idea of PAKing, an alternative medicine treatment that deals with your pneuma and Has the Potential to Change Your Whole Life, Man. Against all odds, PAKing works for Mary.
To continue the treatments, she takes on a job with something called The Girlfriend Experiment, or the GX, which supplies designated "girlfriends" to an actor/director named Kurt Sky, who is trying to "solve the problem of love" by distributing his needs to all these different women and then paying them to fulfill them. He's supposed to fight with and be verbally eviscerated by the Anger Girlfriend, have his shopping done by the Maternal Girlfriend, stare longingly into the Emotional Girlfriend's eyes as she tells him his feelings are valid, and so on. This is inexplicably considered a huge research boon to a group of unnamed scientists who are largely using it as an excuse to monitor and influence emotions via sensors on Kurt and the various women, though the concept of the scientific method appears to have not occurred to anyone.
This never seems even remotely plausible, but for a while, that's fine. Being rooted in Mary's weird, dreamlike perspective means the satirical elements work even when they're not that clever--Kurt fires the Intellectual Girlfriend he's supposed to have discussions with because she doesn't seem to agree with him, do you get it, yes, we do, this no longer qualifies as insight. Mary's POV is not convincing--for a girl raised entirely by a religious extremist and his apparently loyal wife, Mary seems to retain almost no connection with religion, positive or negative, and doesn't seem to have been shaped by it in any way. Her upbringing is largely an excuse to have her be a cultural blank slate, completely ignorant of Kurt and the world of movies since she's never fully seen one--she saw the beginning of Citizen Kane and fell asleep because her attention wanders when she tries to watch TV--and only uses the internet at work. Her qualities come and go depending on how convenient they are for whatever Lacey wants to do at that particular time, so she's savvy enough to do almost everything in the world except watch a movie.
Nevertheless, the most effective parts of the book are the parts that deal with Mary's background, not as something unusual but as something that's universal: Lacey deftly evokes the strange, complicated emotions of someone who has grown distant from her family and is now being forced to confront that distance and how irrevocable it is. The scenes of her attempting to reach her aunt, for example, are heartbreaking, realistic, and precise in their emotional and practical details.
Then we get the roving POV, which ruins any tentative pleasure in the weirdness of the GX by diving into the nitty-gritty of it: certain things don't bear examination because they fall apart, and this is one of them. It works as a device and a symbol, but not at all as a practical thing, yet Lacey insists on giving it, and the people running it, significant focus even as she doesn't make any more of an attempt to make it make any sense. Kurt isn't convincing as a successful actor or as a human being, the various girlfriends are frustratingly simplistic (Ashley, the other one we spend the most time with, the Anger Girlfriend, is an uncannily beautiful aspiring fighter who is chemically manipulated into being in love with Kurt), and the researchers have the same consistency as Mary's characterization and the same realism as the rare unicorn-pegasus.
The point of all this, ostensibly, is to make us think deeply about love and how it intersects with one's concept of oneself, but it's sort of like someone dropping an inflatable palm tree in your office and asking you to meditate on the concept of a beach. Maybe you'll arrive at something revelatory, but it's more likely that you'll just get irritated by the obvious plasticity and the fact that you're here with this instead of elsewhere with something else.
There are flashes of intellectual shine here--the Egany parts--and there's a good enough short story about a mysterious, Safe-style ailment and its treatment coupled with a kind of interesting story about a young woman struggling to reconcile herself with the unusual upbringing she's left behind, but none of it comes together into anything coherent. Lacey herself almost seems to acknowledge that in the middle section, where we abruptly go from first-person POV with Mary to a roving third-person, semi-omni POV that takes in the novel's wider and even less plausible cast. Then the whole thing goes back to Mary and gradually peters out.
Mary was born Junia Stone, the only daughter of a man who decided to raise her in a completely isolated environment so she could live a pure Christian life and he could write a manifesto about how inherently good she is. Instead, she broke away as a teenager and went to live with her aunt, who renamed her and apparently socialized her so well that she was soon able to go to an Ivy League school, where she made one friend, a rich and eccentric girl named Chandra. Years later, when Mary's life has fallen apart and she's gotten massively in debt due to a mysterious debilitating illness that no medical treatment seems to solve, Chandra introduces her to the idea of PAKing, an alternative medicine treatment that deals with your pneuma and Has the Potential to Change Your Whole Life, Man. Against all odds, PAKing works for Mary.
To continue the treatments, she takes on a job with something called The Girlfriend Experiment, or the GX, which supplies designated "girlfriends" to an actor/director named Kurt Sky, who is trying to "solve the problem of love" by distributing his needs to all these different women and then paying them to fulfill them. He's supposed to fight with and be verbally eviscerated by the Anger Girlfriend, have his shopping done by the Maternal Girlfriend, stare longingly into the Emotional Girlfriend's eyes as she tells him his feelings are valid, and so on. This is inexplicably considered a huge research boon to a group of unnamed scientists who are largely using it as an excuse to monitor and influence emotions via sensors on Kurt and the various women, though the concept of the scientific method appears to have not occurred to anyone.
This never seems even remotely plausible, but for a while, that's fine. Being rooted in Mary's weird, dreamlike perspective means the satirical elements work even when they're not that clever--Kurt fires the Intellectual Girlfriend he's supposed to have discussions with because she doesn't seem to agree with him, do you get it, yes, we do, this no longer qualifies as insight. Mary's POV is not convincing--for a girl raised entirely by a religious extremist and his apparently loyal wife, Mary seems to retain almost no connection with religion, positive or negative, and doesn't seem to have been shaped by it in any way. Her upbringing is largely an excuse to have her be a cultural blank slate, completely ignorant of Kurt and the world of movies since she's never fully seen one--she saw the beginning of Citizen Kane and fell asleep because her attention wanders when she tries to watch TV--and only uses the internet at work. Her qualities come and go depending on how convenient they are for whatever Lacey wants to do at that particular time, so she's savvy enough to do almost everything in the world except watch a movie.
Nevertheless, the most effective parts of the book are the parts that deal with Mary's background, not as something unusual but as something that's universal: Lacey deftly evokes the strange, complicated emotions of someone who has grown distant from her family and is now being forced to confront that distance and how irrevocable it is. The scenes of her attempting to reach her aunt, for example, are heartbreaking, realistic, and precise in their emotional and practical details.
Then we get the roving POV, which ruins any tentative pleasure in the weirdness of the GX by diving into the nitty-gritty of it: certain things don't bear examination because they fall apart, and this is one of them. It works as a device and a symbol, but not at all as a practical thing, yet Lacey insists on giving it, and the people running it, significant focus even as she doesn't make any more of an attempt to make it make any sense. Kurt isn't convincing as a successful actor or as a human being, the various girlfriends are frustratingly simplistic (Ashley, the other one we spend the most time with, the Anger Girlfriend, is an uncannily beautiful aspiring fighter who is chemically manipulated into being in love with Kurt), and the researchers have the same consistency as Mary's characterization and the same realism as the rare unicorn-pegasus.
The point of all this, ostensibly, is to make us think deeply about love and how it intersects with one's concept of oneself, but it's sort of like someone dropping an inflatable palm tree in your office and asking you to meditate on the concept of a beach. Maybe you'll arrive at something revelatory, but it's more likely that you'll just get irritated by the obvious plasticity and the fact that you're here with this instead of elsewhere with something else.
June 30, 2020
“But the feelings doesn’t always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn—they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove.�
This is one of the books where I was immersed while reading but once it was over I don’t think it makes that much of an impression on me. Mainly because I don’t know what I should be taking away from it.
Kurt Sky’s ego was so enormous it obscured everything in its path, even the most eloquent writing in this book got shadowed by the exorbitant level of self-absorption that muddied the entire story for me. I so enjoyed Mary’s musing from the opening page (her suffering was portrayed quite well I thought.) but even that wasn’t spared from the overreaching “Experimental Girlfriends� plot. That experiment kinda swallowed her character whole.
The book is too strange to put into words. I got suspicious of almost everything. Questions like “Is this real? Is this really happening?� would occurred to me repeatedly especially in the second half of the book. But mostly I was just wondering if I somehow got manipulated by one of those sneaky geeks in the Research Division and just hadn’t realized it yet...
July 7, 2017
Does everybody who read this book love it except for me? wow.
I thought this book would be interesting, it sounds interesting, it has the promise of being interesting...yet when I was reading it, I couldn't get into it. I felt like the story was boring and confusing. I almost gave up at 40% but I figured that the book might grow on me. So I stuck it out.
What did I learn? Life is too short to read books you don't enjoy.
I thought this book would be interesting, it sounds interesting, it has the promise of being interesting...yet when I was reading it, I couldn't get into it. I felt like the story was boring and confusing. I almost gave up at 40% but I figured that the book might grow on me. So I stuck it out.
What did I learn? Life is too short to read books you don't enjoy.
September 9, 2017
Catherine Lacey is my kind of writer. Or I'm her kind of reader. Either way, it's a love affair. The Answers asks some of the most interesting questions - the kind of questions only the best fiction can pose. A plot summary is not particularly useful with this book - the loose plot is just what happens while Lacey dissects themes of love (who we love, how we love, why we love), loneliness, female identity and art. It's so smart and so weird and so beautiful.
February 22, 2018
I am going to repost the publisher summary of this novel because I am having a hard time explaining it:
And then there is this whole girlfriend experiment which is problematic in its use of women as types or jobs but not people... I mean the guy wants to figure out a way to get rid of the messy parts of relationships, almost exclusively because he thinks that will make him a better artist as an actor. Blech. I think the author wants you to dislike his stance too but it wasn't enjoyable to read about. It also lacked any real scientific possibility, so I was struggling to really give over to the whole thing. I just kept thinking about , which had similar themes and I also listened to on audio.
Another weird part of the book was that every once in a while, the point of view would shift to one of the other girlfriends, like the angry girlfriend, the maternal girlfriend, etc. I would have liked an entire novel about the girlfriends but the brief blips of this didn't end up making sense from a structure standpoint. And there are a lot of details that are brought up and never followed through on, which kind of drove me crazy. Where are MY answers, huh?
I bought this during an Audible BOGO sale, but I first heard about it on Elle's list, and was reminded about it by Frank on The Librarian is In podcast ().
"In Catherine Lacey’s ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the “Girlfriend Experiment,� the brainchild of an eccentric actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship—even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the “Emotional Girlfriend”—certainly better than the “Anger Girlfriend� or the “Maternal Girlfriend”—and is pulled into Kurt’s ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection."Mary is really the focus of the beginning of the novel. Her past is complicated, she keeps it from everyone, she does not consume media, she clearly has trauma but the reader doesn't really know anything. She's a bit of a mystery in that way. But then she gets pulled into this treatment that sounds crazy but seems to be doing something for her, although she doesn't always seem aware of what is happening or how she gets from place to place, which is a little frightening. Somewhere in there, her college roommate/therapist who got her into PAKing disappears into some kind of bizarre death cult which is NEVER EXPLAINED.
And then there is this whole girlfriend experiment which is problematic in its use of women as types or jobs but not people... I mean the guy wants to figure out a way to get rid of the messy parts of relationships, almost exclusively because he thinks that will make him a better artist as an actor. Blech. I think the author wants you to dislike his stance too but it wasn't enjoyable to read about. It also lacked any real scientific possibility, so I was struggling to really give over to the whole thing. I just kept thinking about , which had similar themes and I also listened to on audio.
Another weird part of the book was that every once in a while, the point of view would shift to one of the other girlfriends, like the angry girlfriend, the maternal girlfriend, etc. I would have liked an entire novel about the girlfriends but the brief blips of this didn't end up making sense from a structure standpoint. And there are a lot of details that are brought up and never followed through on, which kind of drove me crazy. Where are MY answers, huh?
I bought this during an Audible BOGO sale, but I first heard about it on Elle's list, and was reminded about it by Frank on The Librarian is In podcast ().
December 7, 2018
One of the weirdest novels I've ever read, and yet I couldn't put it down. The plot of "The Answers" is too difficult to summarize in review form, but I was deeply intrigued by the raw, emotionally aloof voice of the protagonist, Mary. What a kooky little woman. I liked her, and yet I wanted to shake her and scream in her face, "what the hell are you doing?" Catherine Lacey can definitely write, but I don't think this book will be for everyone. Very odd and introspective. Also, "The Answers" might be a trigger for those who are survivors of sexual assault. This wasn't a perfect read, but it was certainly an interesting one. Truly unique.
August 20, 2017
The first section of this book is decent and dangles some intriguing loose threads but the middle switches POV out of nowhere and tries way too hard to SAY SOMETHING IMPORTANT. The end ties up NOTHING and I can guarantee I will immediately forget I've read this. Nothing about it is worth remembering. I should probably just give it one star.
April 27, 2017
So, I'm just going to leave this here, leave it to settle, let the five stars mull, see if they continue to crackle.
It really is almost flawless.
4.347
It really is almost flawless.
4.347
March 12, 2018
Books like The Answers are hard to review. When I turned the last page, I was tingling from the prose, but as time went by I realized there were quite a few aspects that never felt cohesive in hindsight.
I never felt close Mary, the protagonist, but her questions and quiet epiphanies were so well spun that I couldn't get enough of her. It was the quick and random point of view changes that became alarming as the book began it's second act. These moments were so half baked -- the choice was just confusing to me. The only person I would have been curious to discover more about disappears mysteriously, only to eventually send Mary cryptic messages that are never resolved. I felt like some large message must have been going over my head, but I can't imagine what. These are the things that sunk in after I gave this story a few days to marinate.
Despite my criticism, I enjoyed The Answers even though I didn't necessarily get enough of them. I'm excited to read more of Catherine Lacey's work.
I never felt close Mary, the protagonist, but her questions and quiet epiphanies were so well spun that I couldn't get enough of her. It was the quick and random point of view changes that became alarming as the book began it's second act. These moments were so half baked -- the choice was just confusing to me. The only person I would have been curious to discover more about disappears mysteriously, only to eventually send Mary cryptic messages that are never resolved. I felt like some large message must have been going over my head, but I can't imagine what. These are the things that sunk in after I gave this story a few days to marinate.
Despite my criticism, I enjoyed The Answers even though I didn't necessarily get enough of them. I'm excited to read more of Catherine Lacey's work.
Read
June 24, 2017Review to come.
There was some really great writing in this one, but it was somewhat overwhelmed by all the introspection, unnecessary information about characters who don't even seem to factor into the story, and various plot lines that are never resolved.
There was some really great writing in this one, but it was somewhat overwhelmed by all the introspection, unnecessary information about characters who don't even seem to factor into the story, and various plot lines that are never resolved.
Read
October 17, 2017In Catherine Lacey’s second novel, a woman with a mysterious illness pays for her questionable medical treatment by participating in a famous actor’s “girlfriend experiment.� Essentially, he pays different women to perform various roles for him: there’s the Emotional Girlfriend, the Maternal Girlfriend, the Anger Girlfriend. The book, which reads like the lovechild of Chuck Palahniuk and Margaret Atwood, is a little uneven; chapter to chapter, Lacey seems unsure of what kind of book she wants it to be. Yet the book has interesting things to say about gender and love and celebrity, and each time I worried about losing interest, Lacey’s incisive ruminations would draw me back in.
–Michelle Hart
from The Best Books We Read In June 2017:
–Michelle Hart
from The Best Books We Read In June 2017:
August 22, 2017
I wanted to like this book but couldn't. I'm surprised I got through the whole thing, but hate quitting on books and read it in only a few sittings anyways. This is probably because of a lack of any depth to the characters or setting.
So many problems, but my biggest critique is the narration style - if you can call it that. It sloppily bounced from first to third to first person, present tense to flashbacks back to the present without any explanation. Characters were hollow and minimally described. The author is trying for a Fates and Fury-type feel, but it falls really flat. Don't bother.
So many problems, but my biggest critique is the narration style - if you can call it that. It sloppily bounced from first to third to first person, present tense to flashbacks back to the present without any explanation. Characters were hollow and minimally described. The author is trying for a Fates and Fury-type feel, but it falls really flat. Don't bother.
July 3, 2024
Lacey just carried me through a lucid dreamscape, vivid and shimmering. UGH. This was SO beautifully written, endlessly fascinating, and thought provoking. All about love and identity and questioning of what those things even mean. Very 'eternal sunshine' vibes if you catch my drift - a sci-fi (ish) plot to carry these themes and questions through the narrative. Do we actually get the answers? No, not really. And it's all the more beautiful for it. 1st Catherine Lacey a huge success, can't wait to make my way through the rest of her published books.
August 27, 2017
A very thought provoking book. It's not easy to summarize. The important thing is to go with and ponder the questions Ms. Lacey poses.
February 8, 2017
Intriguing and cerebral, this is a story about identity, who we are, and who we choose to be. It stars the young Mary Parsons (née Junia Stone) who leaves her mom-n-pop religious cult with the help of a guardian angel aunt. She ran from a father who planned to raise her “in a state of complete purity, to protect me from the terrible world, and my life would prove his point.� But you can’t make someone else’s life your little pet project, now can you Dr. Moreau? Or…can you? Junia changes to Mary, moves to New York City, gets a crap job, and starts getting all sorts of weird but very expensive health problems. She’s at the end of her rope when two things happen. One is a holistic therapy called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia—PAKing, for short. It’s an awesome-sounding blend of all those non-Western practices that make your dad yell, “Bullshit!� like Reiki, yoga, chiropractics, fumes, and assorted what nots. It’s described to Mary as “[a] whittling away of the energies that can’t exist harmoniously with your pneuma,� and it works. She also gets a supermysterious part-time job as an “experimental� Emotional Girlfriend to an incredibly famous actor/director—so famous that he needs to simulate a normal life by hiring different women to serve various needs (e.g., nagging, sex, anger, etc.). The money is great—pays for PAKing—but what of Mary’s fragile concept of “self�? Is it out of the frying pan of her biological family and into the fire of a contract family? VERDICT Like many a ballet dancer (and also my wife), this is powerful, lithe, graceful, and beautiful stuff.
Find reviews of books for men at Books for Dudes, , the online reader's advisory column for men from Library Journal. Copyright Library Journal.
Find reviews of books for men at Books for Dudes, , the online reader's advisory column for men from Library Journal. Copyright Library Journal.
June 12, 2017
Edit: Here's my interview with Catherine for Kirkus Reviews:
“How sad our respective nothings had seemed at first, the cool absence in a bed, the dinners with a book. Then, even sadder, those nothings became preferable. The simplicity of being alone won out over the complexity of being together.�
“She did miss the comfort of his life drifting beside hers. She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.�
“How sad our respective nothings had seemed at first, the cool absence in a bed, the dinners with a book. Then, even sadder, those nothings became preferable. The simplicity of being alone won out over the complexity of being together.�
“She did miss the comfort of his life drifting beside hers. She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.�
December 18, 2017
An interesting premise, a nice beginning, but an absolute mess. I kept reading because I actually hoped it would improve, but I simply don’t see what so many people loved about this. It’s inconsistent characters spilling bs in nice prose and having interactions that take suspension of belief to a whole new level. Avoid this one.
April 16, 2025
Found this slow to get going, stodgy but littered with great bits of writing, and it took off in the second and third parts. A meditation on love and celebrity in the modern world, how to synthesise, produce it (love/devotion), capture it with new technology, and how that brushes up against the protagonist’s odd religious upbringing.
March 14, 2023
So far, the best one I've read in the "sad/ unhinged women, miserable people being miserable" genre, AKA She's not feeling good at all. I should make a shelf for those because I keep reading them even though I don't enjoy them much.
Honestly, I don't know what to say other than "the book worked for me". I found the characters well written and nuanced enough to be interesting (though don't expect any mind blowing characterization), and the plots, ridiculous as they were, thought provoking. Is alternative medicine all a cult-y scam? Just how far can you take the concept "ego project"? When does science start treading immoral and dehumanizing waters, all in the name of progress, because they wanted to see if they could but never stopped to wonder if they should? Just when do you start losing your autonomy to everyone else who just acts like they know better and when should you just... pack up and bail tf out?
The only part that didn't really work was the ending, I feel like it far overstayed its welcome and that was just too over the top and rushed for me to care. Nothing would've changed if you took that part out so I don't understand why it was in at all.
Honestly, I don't know what to say other than "the book worked for me". I found the characters well written and nuanced enough to be interesting (though don't expect any mind blowing characterization), and the plots, ridiculous as they were, thought provoking. Is alternative medicine all a cult-y scam? Just how far can you take the concept "ego project"? When does science start treading immoral and dehumanizing waters, all in the name of progress, because they wanted to see if they could but never stopped to wonder if they should? Just when do you start losing your autonomy to everyone else who just acts like they know better and when should you just... pack up and bail tf out?
The only part that didn't really work was the ending, I feel like it far overstayed its welcome and that was just too over the top and rushed for me to care. Nothing would've changed if you took that part out so I don't understand why it was in at all.
March 19, 2025
Didn't expect this to have such strong Murakami vibes but I loved it.
February 27, 2018
Much ado... Sto cominciando a chiedermi, in realtà me lo chiedo da un po', se sono io ad avere gusti difficili e non mi piace più niente, o se sia diventato comune gridare al capolavoro per niente.
Ho comprato questo libro, dopo essermi segnata in wishlist il suo precedente e averlo ancora lì, perchè ci sono finita sopra letteralmente in Feltrinelli e proprio quella mattina avevo letto la seconda recensione entusiasta. E siccome io credo al destino e credo, soprattutto di essere una povera deficiente a 43 anni, l'ho comprato subito, subitissimo. Incuriosita, inizio a leggere e sottolineo. Sottolineo copiosamente e dico 'ah sì certo, ah sì avevano ragione, ah sì che roba'. E vado avanti per una buona metà di libro. Poi mi rompo le palle, perché quello che leggo comincio a trovarlo stucchevole, un po' banale e francamente, bella idea, ma dopo 100 pagine anche basta. Rivedo le sottolineature e le trovo un po' così, da me 25enne. O sarò io che mi trovo un po' così in sto periodo.
Da leggere? Se vi interessano degli pseudo esperimenti sociali, se riuscite ad odiare un personaggio dopo poche pagine, se avete tempo, se non avete letto le recensioni.
Ma comunque, sempre, con qualcosa da bere in mano. A volte basta un bicchiere d'acqua, frizzante va che vi da una botta di vita.
Ho comprato questo libro, dopo essermi segnata in wishlist il suo precedente e averlo ancora lì, perchè ci sono finita sopra letteralmente in Feltrinelli e proprio quella mattina avevo letto la seconda recensione entusiasta. E siccome io credo al destino e credo, soprattutto di essere una povera deficiente a 43 anni, l'ho comprato subito, subitissimo. Incuriosita, inizio a leggere e sottolineo. Sottolineo copiosamente e dico 'ah sì certo, ah sì avevano ragione, ah sì che roba'. E vado avanti per una buona metà di libro. Poi mi rompo le palle, perché quello che leggo comincio a trovarlo stucchevole, un po' banale e francamente, bella idea, ma dopo 100 pagine anche basta. Rivedo le sottolineature e le trovo un po' così, da me 25enne. O sarò io che mi trovo un po' così in sto periodo.
Da leggere? Se vi interessano degli pseudo esperimenti sociali, se riuscite ad odiare un personaggio dopo poche pagine, se avete tempo, se non avete letto le recensioni.
Ma comunque, sempre, con qualcosa da bere in mano. A volte basta un bicchiere d'acqua, frizzante va che vi da una botta di vita.
July 3, 2017
Full of the same potent prose as Lacey's debut, this one feels much more muddied. Perhaps it is because it started as two separate stories that merged into a novel (you can feel that at the outset) and perhaps it is because things largely go unresolved. There is a restlessness to this novel that makes it, at times, difficult to read - as though you can see the author working through things right there on the page, not always successfully.
Still, the ideas powering this are inspired. I could've read twice as much about the GX without getting bored - and I hope there's more out there about some of the stranger things that brush up alongside (without ever fully entering) this novel's main plots.
Still, the ideas powering this are inspired. I could've read twice as much about the GX without getting bored - and I hope there's more out there about some of the stranger things that brush up alongside (without ever fully entering) this novel's main plots.
June 13, 2017
Some of it transcendent, some of it could have used some more thought/refinement. Some of it was old ideas thought and written about in completely new and inspiring ways and some of it was old ideas given the "college juniors discussing like they are the first people to ever think about love" treatment. Luckily the college junior* tinged parts parts are very few, but still very jarring in what is mostly a really great book. Writing amazing throughout.
* no actual college juniors in book, I am only using this as a description for level of discourse FYI
* no actual college juniors in book, I am only using this as a description for level of discourse FYI
September 3, 2017
In The Answers, Catherine Lacey really comes into her own as a writer. I read her books and this year, and without a doubt I was most impressed by The Answers. In fact, I think The Answers is one of the best books of 2017.
The novel is about Mary Parsons, a young woman who has suffered from an unexplained host of symptoms that no doctor can diagnose for over a year. Mary is in constant pain with no relief and her medical bills and credit card debt keep piling up. Then she finds Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia (PAKing), a holistic healing practice the mechanics of which are hazy. But it immediately begins to give her relief. Unfortunately, it's very expensive, and Mary requires many months of the sessions to be cured of her ailments. So she gets a job as the Emotional Girlfriend in the Girlfriend Experiment. The Girlfriend Experiment is a research experiment on romantic love that's been orchestrated by the movie star Kurt Sky (think an obnoxious version of James Franco). In addition to Mary, Kurt has hired various other women to fulfill other roles that make up the perfect romantic relationship: there's an Anger Girlfriend, a Maternal Girlfriend, and a whole Intimacy Team.
Sound weird? It is. But deliciously so. Lacey balances several unusual topics with equal aplomb and makes them all fascinating. The Answers reminded me of a great indie movie (and probably could be adapted into one). I loved reading about PAKing, the Girlfriend Experiment, and Mary's religious, survivalist childhood. How she adjusted (or failed to adjust) from a closed-off life in Tennessee to college and work in New York City is a really interesting journey.
Lacey makes bold choices with style, format, and point of view. She reins in her style here for maximum effect, never going overboard with digressions or stream of consciousness. Every subplot and musing serves the whole and makes up beautiful tapestry. I was equally invested in all the characters we follow and in all the points of view. There is a great, wide array of female characters from all walks of life. It feels very feminist. There is humor here, especially with how pretentious and ridiculous Kurt Sky is. The funny parts balance out the sadness nicely.
This is a novel filled with great insights into love and relationships. It gets you questioning things and contemplating things. It explores abuse, personhood, sexism, and identity. Lacey captures and puts into words so many feelings perfectly. I flagged many stunning, beautiful quotes. She really is a great writer. Mary's past and present intertwine and inform each other. In The Answers, there's a better balance of current day and flashbacks than there was in (where I found one to be more interesting than the other). One of my favorite parts of was the scientific study the heroine takes part in. I think it's very cool that Lacey wrote The Answers, which revolves around an experiment. She excels at writing about this kind of thing. She also excels at writing about being a woman in the 21st century.
The Answers is a smart and original read. I highly recommend that you read it. I look forward to more work from Catherine Lacey, and I hope it lives up to the caliber of The Answers.
The novel is about Mary Parsons, a young woman who has suffered from an unexplained host of symptoms that no doctor can diagnose for over a year. Mary is in constant pain with no relief and her medical bills and credit card debt keep piling up. Then she finds Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia (PAKing), a holistic healing practice the mechanics of which are hazy. But it immediately begins to give her relief. Unfortunately, it's very expensive, and Mary requires many months of the sessions to be cured of her ailments. So she gets a job as the Emotional Girlfriend in the Girlfriend Experiment. The Girlfriend Experiment is a research experiment on romantic love that's been orchestrated by the movie star Kurt Sky (think an obnoxious version of James Franco). In addition to Mary, Kurt has hired various other women to fulfill other roles that make up the perfect romantic relationship: there's an Anger Girlfriend, a Maternal Girlfriend, and a whole Intimacy Team.
Sound weird? It is. But deliciously so. Lacey balances several unusual topics with equal aplomb and makes them all fascinating. The Answers reminded me of a great indie movie (and probably could be adapted into one). I loved reading about PAKing, the Girlfriend Experiment, and Mary's religious, survivalist childhood. How she adjusted (or failed to adjust) from a closed-off life in Tennessee to college and work in New York City is a really interesting journey.
Lacey makes bold choices with style, format, and point of view. She reins in her style here for maximum effect, never going overboard with digressions or stream of consciousness. Every subplot and musing serves the whole and makes up beautiful tapestry. I was equally invested in all the characters we follow and in all the points of view. There is a great, wide array of female characters from all walks of life. It feels very feminist. There is humor here, especially with how pretentious and ridiculous Kurt Sky is. The funny parts balance out the sadness nicely.
This is a novel filled with great insights into love and relationships. It gets you questioning things and contemplating things. It explores abuse, personhood, sexism, and identity. Lacey captures and puts into words so many feelings perfectly. I flagged many stunning, beautiful quotes. She really is a great writer. Mary's past and present intertwine and inform each other. In The Answers, there's a better balance of current day and flashbacks than there was in (where I found one to be more interesting than the other). One of my favorite parts of was the scientific study the heroine takes part in. I think it's very cool that Lacey wrote The Answers, which revolves around an experiment. She excels at writing about this kind of thing. She also excels at writing about being a woman in the 21st century.
The Answers is a smart and original read. I highly recommend that you read it. I look forward to more work from Catherine Lacey, and I hope it lives up to the caliber of The Answers.
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