"Weirdo" by Sara Pascoe

An audio book. The narrative is interrupted by school reports, letters about her debt, etc.

The narrator Sophie, 32, works as barmaid in Essex. Chris, an ex-colleague who she fancied, comes in with a girlfriend, Ella (who's in a relationship with Steve). Sophie hasn't seen him for 3 years. When Chris went to Australia she'd followed him so she could bump into him by chance - after which nothing happened except a kiss. Partly because of that holiday she's over £10k in debt. She says wacky things to mates which they laugh at because they think she's making them up.

Her father's in Australia, evading taxes. She currently lives with Ian who fears her sexuality. It's not love. She used to live with James who got her pregnant. She had an abortion. James is about to marry her sister Dayna. On New Year's Eve, Chris is at her bar. He takes her home. When they have sex he tries to be considerate. It doesn't work. He mistakes her cries of pain as excitement. She discovers he's soon to marry his Australian boyfriend. In the days after she feels she's finally achieved her aim. She discovers she's pregnant. She's happy. She thinks destiny has planned things that way. She miscarries. She leaves Ian. Ella (who Chris exploited the same way he exploited Sophie) leaves Steve and as sex with women.

3 themes emerge -

• She has disassociation issues, feeling that her character isn't part of her, etc. She thinks she could be an experiment, a brain in a jar, and "not even the most important brain in the jar". She read Camus' "The Stranger". She thinks she may be a non-violent psychopath. At school she was clever but caused trouble, having fantasy/reality issues. She tries to show the emotions that people expect. Ian blames it on her cold mother. When Sophie's pregnant she feels that the baby is taking her over.
• She thinks she's a twin, lacking a spiritual partner as in Plato. She sees Dayna or Ella as her twin.
• Destiny: fate works in mysterious ways.

I like -

• She has an idea of marketing Smart Scissors - scissors that won't let the user cut their own hair if they currently have low self-esteem.
• She says that some films are much sadder the second time around - it hurts to see the characters oblivious to the trouble ahead.

The internal monologue is too mundane and needs editing. As a psychological profile it fails - it needs to be more forensic. If she falls in love with men who love her because she wants to be loved (self-validation), then the Chris obsession is odd, and her response strange. As comedy it's not funny enough.

Other reviews

• Ella Risbridger (There’s a touch of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time here; plus, perhaps, a very funny, candid smattering of Louise Rennison’s beloved teen diarist Georgia Nicolson. Pascoe has written about her adolescent love of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, and it’s not hard to draw the line between his naive, careful philosopher Sophie and hers. If you combined those three teenagers, and aged them up 15 years, you might find something of her narrator’s pure, strange tone.)
• Hephzibah Anderson (Just how far from “normal” is Sophie? Her paranoia suggests she’s not merely kooky but needs real help, and this can make for uncomfortable laughter.)
• Annie Kapur (I would definitely call this book a failed attempt at stream-of-consciousness because none of it really comes together. ... I know she states that she wants to keep these things for her future biographer because she is a narcissist, but I cannot help but think that these debt letters do nothing for the overall story. She tells us she is in debt many, many times, we do not require actual physical proof of that. ... I genuinely don't care about her dating life because her professional life is so badly put together I cannot fathom how anyone can stand her even as a friend, let alone a romantic partner.... All in all, I found the characters of this book simply too insufferable to read. It wasn't funny but it was faux-quirky and got tired very quickly.))