let me convince you to read evenings & weekends by oisín mckenna

for fans of brandon taylor, sally rooney, and maybe richard curtis

Spoilers for tone, themes, and a few quotes. This book has trigger warnings for sexual assault, homophobia, brief mentions of disordered eating, pregnancy/abortion, cancer diagnosis, allusions to suicide.

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James Lenney

The other day I stumbled on a post by

grace

, and with just a few words, she influenced me to check out Oisín McKenna’s book Evenings & Weekends. This takes me back to simpler times, when I’d meet up with a friend and they’d gush about how I absolutely had to read this book they just started, when I’d wander around the bookstore and choose what to read simply based on the covers and the synopses rather than a starred review on Goodreads.

I was drawn in by the blurb she wrote up, and then when I looked up the cover and synopsis, I felt smitten. Then smitten turned to obsessed. Obsessed evolved into feral. I quickly became consumed with the idea of this book, that something pitched as Richard Curtis-esque would be right up my alley, that I would finally connect to a book like I haven’t in ages. This book would save my life, it would fix me, it would convert me to a new religion, the church of OISÍN. My life could change in just one evening. Or maybe a weekend.

The book just released a few weeks ago, so even though it’s been well-received overall, it doesn’t have very many readers at the moment. New releases are fun, but not until months have passed and everyone has gotten the chance for their hold to come in from the library. I didn’t know whose opinion to trust, if there even was an opinion to listen to, and the library would take about ten weeks to get me a loan for this story. Do I pay the $15 for my own eBook copy? Should I just get it in hardcover? Is it actually going to be a new favorite or am I kidding myself and purchasing it would be a huge mistake?

This is the thought process I walk through with most books nowadays. I do the balancing equation, trying to determine if a new book I haven’t read is worth owning when I’m already out of shelf space and I need to be on a book buying ban.

Needless to say, after about a day of deliberating, I bought the eBook.

I now wish I had bought the hardcover.

Better people than me could write real essays on this book, could write commentary on the politics of Britain, could reflect on male queerness or Catholic guilt or motherhood. But right now it’s still small. It’s relatively unheard of in my circles, if only because it just released. This is how it felt when I listened to “Pink Pony Club” in May of 2020, before Chappell Roan was even a character. It’s mine. It’s tucked away safely where nobody can damage it. There’s not a movie option or casting announcement. It’s just a quiet little book about British and Irish people during a hot summer weekend.

Admittedly, I like keeping great art to myself. As much as I yell at my friends and followers to go borrow that book from the library or be sure to add this movie to your watchlist, I actually am quite territorial. (Maybe it’s the Taurus in me.) I don’t like sharing, and often that’s because when you share with the wrong person, bad things can happen. Either they’ll peddle the piece off on other people, sometimes to the point that they’ll claim they found the thing even though you both know you introduced it to them, or they’ll completely hate it and make sure you know just how horrible your taste is.

And yeah, I’ll be honest, I like being the girl who starts things. I like that I’m a trendsetter. Sue me.

All of this to say, I can safely say that I did not start this book’s trend, I did get recommended it by Grace as I said, but now it is my turn to pass it on to you like pushing a delicate baby bird out of the nest.

Tread lightly. Special story ahead. You are now holding Jenna’s heart in your hands.

LitFic is such a slippery genre because I’ve found that books in this category swing dramatically between THE BEST FICTION YOU’VE EVER READ and the absolute worst. The characters can be beautiful and relatable, but more often than not they’re grating and irresponsible and gross. The plots of these books are almost never realistic, or they are but they’re so grotesque that you have to wonder who these types of stories are happening to in real life. You have to accept that you might not know if you love or hate a book until 75% through, and only after you reach the climax can you finally determine how you feel about anything.

Which is to say, that’s how this book starts. As much as I picked this up for the Richard Curtis implications, I was also intrigued by the general tone. It’s an Irish/British novel set in the heatwave of 2019, and since it’s been nearly 95º here all week, I wanted something to drown my miseries in. I wanted someone to speak about sweat behind your knees. I wanted someone who understood that heat means waiting for something, anything. I wanted to watch people come undone as their patience melted away.

The perks of going into a novel without much information is that you are always surprised where the story goes. The opening chapter talks about a beached whale in London (yes, in London), but what does that have to do with anything? Who is our story about? Should I have paid closer attention to the Goodreads synopsis instead of just chanting Richard Curtis Richard Curtis Richard Curtis over and over in my head? (Sorry, I love About Time, sue me.) No, I think it’s good to leave myself open to discovery. To let the story come to me, slowly, like a cat.

I’m hesitant to tell you all the ways it resonated with me, if only because I want you to leave yourself open to experience. I am quite certain this book is not going to be for everyone, and yes I should probably also include the bit of the blurb that says this is for fans of Sally Rooney (Why didn’t you say so Jenna!!!! Sorry, I have only seen Normal People and I was mostly unmoved…post for another day.) so maybe that tells you just what you’re getting into. But that’s the risk you run with everything. My cup of tea is not always yours, but if you follow my posts, there’s a higher than average chance that we share a few brain cells.

Personally, I think this book has much more in common with Brandon Taylor than Sally Rooney (as if I’ve ever read any SR). Brandon Taylor writes a lot of campus novels, choosing to explore the relationship between The Artist and The Student, how they’re often one and the same and often in conflict with each other, and his work is aggressively, brutally queer and low class. He writes from a dark place, and yet often he finds pockets of light in the most unusual places. He chases after the dreams that don’t get built, that fall by the wayside, that might have been. That’s how Oisín Mckenna feels too.

Taylor is clearly, aggressively American and Black, and McKenna is Irish and white, so keeping in mind the differences that would arise out of that, we can safely say they are nothing alike. But as someone who fell in love with The Late Americans, I see so many similarities between this book and that one. Both Taylor and McKenna write exquisite descriptions, create characters that are at once relatable and endearing but also grotesque and heartbreaking, and ruminate on topics such as class and queerness in such a thought-provoking way. Part of why E&W feels so parallel to TLA in my experience is because both play around with perspective so well. There’s an omniscience in E&W that feels reminiscent of the short story style in TLA, and while I think E&W is more fluid than Taylor’s book, they work well together. Every scene feels like a vignette in the best way. Both of these authors breathe life into side characters until you care about them, and then they bring those side characters back in contact with the main characters until the cast becomes so vibrant that you’re not sure who we’re supposed to focus on.

This book is not a campus novel. Rather, it follows a wide cast of adults. New adults like people approaching thirty, but older adults too. You can draw parallels between the pregnant girl who’s almost in her third decade and her best friend’s sixty-year-old mother. The story has a universality that few books do nowadays, that weaves webs between all ages. It calls into question the cyclical nature of life, that sometimes a thirty year old and a sixty year old feel the same things but they can never communicate that.

Admittedly some of the character archetypes are not my favorite to read about. I’m not a fan of pregnancy, I haven’t reached a point where I like sitting in the brains of middle-aged people, and I’ve never really understood polyamory as a concept or a sexuality. But McKenna made me not only care about these people, but he made me relate to them in bizarre ways. I saw myself in people that I never have before. I understand the world differently than before I started this book.

I see myself a little differently too, I think.

As with most LitFic, this book is a very fine line between uncomfortable and endearing. So much of this book plays off the summer heat, the stew that builds off sweat and bad decisions, the mistakes and secrets of people who aren’t particularly good at heart. But that’s there the tension lies. Can you be a good person if you’ve made a few mistakes? Can you love well even after you’ve broken someone’s heart? If they’ve broken yours? How do you find joy and beauty in the tragedies of life?

To some people, this book will feel depressing, especially if you don’t finish it. Most of the resolution comes in the last few pages, and the resolution is just like life: bittersweet. But I think criticizing the book for its darker nature is not only counterproductive but it completely misses the point. The reason people read Sally Rooney or Brandon Taylor or LitFic in general isn’t for a happy ending, it’s not to follow perfect, lovable people as they live their cozy lives. This book and those that have come before it are about the tension that follows us throughout our lifetimes: you will fuck up, spectacularly and in ugly ways, and you will have to come to terms with how you’ve hurt both other people and yourselves, but that shouldn’t stop you from living. There is forgiveness even when life is hard. Sometimes you cannot live your dreams, sometimes your dreams come true and they’re not what you wanted after all, sometimes you find out too late just what you wanted. But that’s what makes life compelling: that one decision can change who you are in the blink of an eye.

It’s sad. It’s a book that has a cancer diagnosis in it. It deals with the aftermath of sexual assault. It touches on abortion and what it’s like being lower class. It writes about the long-term effects of grief. There’s a humanity that’s present in each of these characters, even the ones we only interact with briefly, and it’s the most compelling part of the story, that even someone you see on the tube or at the beach has a story and a past and a future, if they want it, if they’re allowed it.

I’m going to be completely honest, I do believe that in the next five years we could see a mini-series or film adaptation of this. As far as I know it hasn’t been optioned yet, but it’s the exact kind of shit that people watch these days. There are so many possibilities for a screen version, I honestly hope that someone decides to pick it up, if only because it’s so queer. Hey, maybe we can convince Richard Curtis to take a stab at it. (Although, if I’m being honest, I think this is a few steps shy of Richard Curtis, if only because I think this is grittier and harder than his stuff. Less fluffy.)

At the end of the day, this book feels like a piece of me now. I’m not sure I should even share it with you because if we’re not careful, BookTok will find it and then in ten months Paul Mescal will be attached to the project and while that wouldn’t be the worst thing, it would feel so painfully cliché. I want to hold some of the mystery a little longer. The quietness and solitude that comes with a book only you’ve read. That you can text six different people “HAVE YOU READ THIS?” and know that none of them have heard of it, that none of them have a clue what journey you’ve just been on.

It’s not perfect, hell I’m not even sure it’ll rank very high on my favorite books list, but it felt like a beautiful fever dream. I couldn’t put it down, could not stop highlighting it, just wanted to devour it in one sitting. It reminded me why I love LitFic. It made me feel just a little bit better about sweating in the 95º heat.