Keep Tabs on your Friends Don’t Keep Tabs For Your Friends!!!

a review of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

I find that life takes on a stagnant pond-like quality: scummy on the surface, nothing exciting happening except for some garbage, perhaps those are tadpoles but maybe someone dumped spoilt bubble tea in the pond instead. Hence the allure of the rapid downward spiral, where everything tanks and the shitty problems in different corners of your life compound to make something much worse.

Queenie’s spiral begins with her slow peel of a breakup with her (I’m assuming pallid) white boyfriend, Tom. She has to move out of their shared apartment and moves into a housing situation with grimy craigslist roommates. A downward spiral that begins with a breakup is stupid. Everything interesting about this book has nothing to do with PWB (pallid white boyfriend) yet Carty-Williams uses flashbacks to rehash his suckiness and I’m not sure what else. How ill-suited they are together? Queenie and Tom met in a park while she was reading, which is what I have been trying to do all of Quarantine but now I’m like… I’ll pass if it leads to PWB. If I am ever that obsessed about a guy who sucks, I’ll eat my hat, she says, her mouth full of hat. 

There are a lot of brave and cool things about Queenie, one of which is not when she makes a group chat with random friends from different parts of her life and uses it exclusively to complain about her problems. And I’m saying this as a long time advocate of complaining. When you describe your problems to trusted confidantes, they can help you put them in context and serve as a check and balance on your most self-sabo instincts. Which is just… not what happens in this book. Queenie huddles friends from different areas of her life (vibey) into a groupchat called the Corgis, named after the fluffy-butted dogs that are dutiful followers of the queen (not vibey). One of her friends bankrolls her in lean times (good) and then, during a friend divorce, SAYS SHE WILL SEND QUEENIE A TAB SHE CAN PAY (very bad!!!!). Keep tabs on your friends don’t keep tabs for your friends.

Anyhoo, Queenie’s demise was not for me. The Queenie blurb self-promotes as “Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Americanah,” which begs the question… should the two have ever met in the first place? No! The interesting threads of this book were buried in a banal quilt of a breakup story.