Everyone Knows How Much I Love You

April 6, 2020
Rose, the unhinged narrator of McCarthy’s grimly comic debut, is the sort of childhood friend best left behind. In high school, Rose set her sights on Leo, the boyfriend of her best friend, Lacie. After Leo “wouldn’t shut up” about Lacie while Rose was driving him to meet her in the middle of the night, Rose crashed her car and ran away, leaving Leo bloodied and unconscious. Twelve years later, Rose tracks down Lacie in New York City, where they both live. Rose is working on a novel about her youth and making ends meet as an SAT tutor, a job she lands after fudging her qualifications. Lacie is working as a graphic artist and dating Ian, a painter. Rose worms her way into sharing Lacie’s apartment, and soon, in the best horror movie tradition, is costuming herself in Lacie’s clothes, throwing herself at Ian, and generally taking possession of Lacie’s life, with predictably disastrous consequences. A classic unreliable narrator, Rose glibly explains away even her most horrific actions. McCarthy’s pitch-dark tone extends outward from her narrator to the rest of the cast of characters, all motivated by self-interest and most even less self-aware than Rose. This is a deliciously incisive tale.

April 15, 2020
Exploring a troubled, obsessive friendship between two young women in New York. Whatever happened between Lacie and Rose in high school, they're not saying--not to each other or to anyone else. They haven't seen each other in more than a decade. Now Rose, a writer years deep into working on a novel based on their shared experience, has moved to New York and then, before either of them can catch their breath, into Lacie's apartment. McCarthy's debut is an utterly taut construction, as unsettling as it is propulsive. Rose narrates the novel--both in present-day scenes and in high school flashbacks--but it quickly becomes clear that she may not always make the most reliable source. Throughout, McCarthy toys with the idea of double consciousness: Rose, who scrapes together an income tutoring privileged teenagers, listens to one of her clients explain the notion this way: "It's when you see yourself from the inside, like a normal person, but also from the outside." As Rose digs deeper into her novel--sneaking into Lacie's room, trying on Lacie's clothes, hoping to gain insight for the character she's based on Lacie--the limits of her own self-awareness become more and more clear. Meanwhile, the obsessive cast to her friendship with Lacie continues to heighten. Ironically, though, as Rose's agent compliments her on her portrayal of the fictional Lacie, the other Lacie--the one we're reading about--remains something of a cipher. Rose grows into one of the more complex--and, sometimes, plainly repugnant--characters of recent fiction, but Lacie, the object of her fascination, remains, for most of the novel, just that: a blank object. McCarthy's debut, with the acumen of the best literary fiction and the suspense of a psychological thriller, is a marvel.

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May 15, 2020
Childhood best friends reconnect in McCarthy's debut novel of obsession and betrayal. Rose and Lacie were inseparable until the suspicious car accident involving Rose, who was driving, and Lacie's then boyfriend, Leo. Now they haven't seen each other in a dozen years, but when Rose moves to New York City to work on her novel, she reconnects with Lacie.They restart a friendship full of distrust and seemingly false intimacy, even after Rose moves into Lacie's apartment. Under the guise of research for her novel, a thinly veiled story of the womens' childhoods and rupture, Rose begins to embody Lacie a la Single White Female?snooping through her things, wearing her clothes, cozying up with her boyfriend?with predictably disastrous consequences. McCarthy unfolds the story in a delightfully suspenseful way, even while some bombshells fizzle, using the duplicitous and unreliable Rose to full effect. Readers who need a character to root for won't find one here, but those who enjoy books about the dark side of female friendship?think Megan Abbott?will be right at home.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)