Book review: Distorted view of reality is a common theme

Marni Appleton presents us with a glimpse of sexually fluid, uncertain, and hedonistic characters in 'I Hope You're Happy'

Marni Appleton’s writing has appeared in the Irish literary journal, 'Banshee', among others. Picture: Ciarán Dowd

• I Hope You’re Happy 
• Marni Appleton 
• The Indigo Press, €15.99 

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.”