Comment on ‘Pages for Her,’ by Sylvia Brownrigg

‘Pages for Her,’ by Sylvia Brownrigg

Relieved, intrigued, we think: I’m in — like falling happily into step alongside someone we’ve just met, because their conversation feels provocative and promising. “Pages for Her” is a sequel — 20 years on, in its characters’ lives — to “Pages for You” (2001), which made a significant splash as a kind of erotic bildungsroman, tracking then-18-year-old Flannery’s sexual (and intellectual) awakening in an intense affair with her then-teaching assistant, the sharply beautiful, imperious Anne Arden. Readers will be glad to know that it’s not strictly necessary to read “Pages for You” first, since Brownrigg has efficiently built that novel’s essence into this sequel. [...] reading “You” after “Her” (which I did) provides a fascinating treat, allowing us to travel back in time and eavesdrop on its characters’ younger selves. Flannery, now about 38, lives in a luscious-sounding, renovated house in the Upper Haight with her adorable, preschool-age daughter Willa, and her ebullient, abrasive husband Charles, an iconoclastic and much-sought installation artist. Like some of literature’s most delicious stories, “Pages for Her” commences with the arrival of a letter: an invitation from her old university to take part in a writers’ conference. Flannery’s prior impassioned, doomed affair with Anne, followed by gypsying with a new girlfriend (on which Flannery has based a successful novel); then, latterly, being drawn into the insatiable vortex of Charles. Flannery mulls the sequence: Bisexuality ...

 

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