The Regrets
Well September seems to be rapidly sunsetting. The start of fall, even though it has been pretty warm in Brooklyn, charges me up with an espresso shot of myself. Imagine my surprise when all my fall-caffeine energy still didn’t feel like enough to get everything done.
This month I’ve been craving activities: I feel like my summer routine isn’t fitting anymore, so I guess I’m adding “check time out for things to do” to my list. I am feeling pretty good about my reading, though. My main resolution in 2021 was to rehabilitate my relationship with pleasure reading. I felt like school had kind of destroyed my drive to pick up a book...not to mention my years in the publishing industry. But…I’ve read 22 books so far this year! Everytime I look at my list of titles I feel so lucky that I took the time to care for my creative brain, and get this interest back on track. (Also yes I did count the books I’ve read for work don’t judge me. ) My point is, I never thought that reading would ever be a challenge for me, so when it became one, I was discouraged. I questioned myself rather than the circumstances (cough cough, years of school assignments and covid). I’m glad to have given myself a second chance and pushed through, to have kept building my list of books and ideas until I felt up to tackling them.
This one, The Regrets, by Amy Bonnaffons, was actually one I’ve had on my list for a while. I made direct eye contact with it in Barnes and Noble when it first came out, and then direct eye contact with the hardcover price. Fast forward a few months, and my trusty library hooked me UP.
The Regrets is a speculative, fabulist vibe that follows an intense romance between Rachel, and Thomas, except Thomas, is dead. After a car accident, he finds himself back on earth, a ghost searching for closure that will allow him to complete his life on Earth. When he and Rachel meet, he is warned that he might incur regrets, but their connection is too strong to shirk. I don’t know if I’ve read a book that was more specifically my taste...ever. This is exactly the book I would recommend to myself if I was me, so even though there were some weak spots, I loved reading it. Bonnaffons not only has a last name that sounds like some delicious dessert, she is also a skilled writer. As you might imagine, she writes with a distance from her characters, which I have a history of enjoying, and there are also angels and ghosts and mystics that blend satisfyingly with the normal everyday landscape of Greenpoint, where the book is set.
All that being said, it does read like a long short story/a first book. A few moments feel under defined, and underplayed. I specifically was sad that Thomas didn’t get a chance for a final say at the end of the book: With a split perspective between Thomas, Rachel, and Rachel’s ex, Mark, I was expecting each to have equal weight, but Thomas faded out (in more ways than one) and I wish that he had gotten more of a say in the ending.
This book tastes like a rainy day and a hot london fog drink. At its heart, its a story of love and how time crumbles everything we know. I think a lot about this one is going to stay with me, but something specific that I haven’t stopped thinking about since I closed the covers is Rachel’s conception of “the daydream”. The daydream is a romantic infatuation that takes over her brain and then deserts it, without any warning. Rachel explains: “It’s not that the daydream bears too little relationship to reality. It’s the opposite: the daydream can create reality. When I eventually fell out of love with these men it was not because I discovered some factual error; it was not that the men themselves were realer than the daydream...these men could not withstand the daydream’s reality.”
In the novel, Rachel is powerless to stop the daydream’s desertion, but she is also powerless to disagree with its actions. It reminded me about the way people speak about inspiration: either it is there or it is not, and we seek it but cannot force it. When Bonnaffons applied the notion of inspiration to love/infatuation I found myself fearfully nodding along. The idea that love walks in and out and all you can do is grasp at its fingers and hold on for as long as you can? True and terrible. Time kills most things, and there is sometimes nothing left but the regrets you leave in your wake.
I’m not sure you’ll like this title as much as I did, but I am sure that Bonnaffons’ work is something to keep an eye out for. Let me know if you check it out. Also, if you feel like you’re slowly fading out of the daydream, I made you a playlist full of love/losing love songs.
