Jane is Trying (W&N Essentials)

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Suttie portrays the more honest aspects of what are usually regarded as the best parts of life - family, relationships, friends, careers - with warmth and grit ― I NEWSPAPER --This text refers to the hardcover edition. I thought that the big reveal of what happened in Room 3 would go some way to explaining Jane’s motivations and actions in her adult life but in the end it felt a bit of a let-down. I would still perhaps proceed with caution if you’re planning to read this and feeling overly sensitive to fertility chat.

Loved the depiction of OCD, always in the background like a thread running through the story, but not a total defining personality trait. The character depiction is very similar to Love Letters, which I liked, but I just couldn’t root for the main character. A few days in Southend with two female friends felt thrillingly exotic after being locked down in Camberwell, south London for the past 15 months. I also enjoyed the ending, and how it didn't exactly follow the predictable ending I was expecting, but instead felt like Jane making some 'happy compromises', which felt like quite a wholesome ending. Everyone assumes they know best but all their interventions buffet her away from the happiness she’d get from being in control.

Also shout out to the birthing scene, one of the few pieces of writing that's come close to making me actually laugh out loud. Despite being a fan of Suttie's, including seeing her performing live and enjoying her previous book The Actual One, I wasn't sure about this at first.

I thought Jane Is Trying was a very good debut, dealing with issues of mental health and pregnancy at a later stage, as well as challenging the idea that you have to stick with the way your life is just because it's always been that way. There's a mystery, something bad that happened in Jane's past - there may have been some eye rolling on my part when that is first mentioned but what is revealed is not at all the same sort of event as we might now expect.

Before my dad died, Elis had asked his permission to marry me, which was amazing, but then never produced a ring or officially proposed. Jane is a woman in her late thirties, stuck in her parents house in the Peak District after leaving her boyfriend behind in London. Having been spoiled by the joyous radio series 'Isy Suttie's Love Letters', reading her writing without the addition of her wonderful narration meant that it took a little while for me to get into this book. Here, Jane can no longer be the commander of her own destiny, with interference from every quarter: meddling friends, suffocating family, terrible therapists and more.

The first chapter was a set piece about a poetry reading which was a bit lazy as a satire, and in the first 50 pages I was still waiting to understand what the point of this novel was, seemingly a slow reveal about an affair but with wry observations tacked onto most sentences and nothing that made me want to read on despite a lack of plot. Mark Steel lives down the road and told me amazing stories about living in squats during the 80s that had me crying with laughter. Funny (of course), with heavy subjects written in a light, somewhat anxious, tone Suttie’s debut hit all the right marks. The book does touch over important topics such as mental health and IVF but in the end she just started to piss me off?Some continuity issues aside, this was a story that kept me interested, wanting to know what happened next, and there were some interesting supporting characters along the way. Instead, she keeps referring to herself as a worrier (a worrier who's not concerned about taking antidepressants, funnily enough). she discovers her fiance cheating on her and moves back in with her parents in a small village, leaving her independence and life in London behind.