Say Say Say

A novel

By: Lila Savage

Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan

One of the The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Fiction Books of 2019

"A gem of a book...lyrical, tender, and profoundly insightful." (Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone)

A beautiful, bracingly honest debut novel about the triangle formed between a young woman and the couple whose life she enters one transformative year: a story about love and compassion, the fluidity of desire, and the myriad ways of devotion.

Ella is nearing 30, and not yet living the life she imagined. Her artistic ambitions as a student in Minnesota have given way to an unintended career in caregiving. One spring, Bryn - a retired carpenter - hires her to help him care for Jill, his wife of many years. A car accident caused a brain injury that has left Jill verbally diminished; she moves about the house like a ghost of her former self, often able to utter, like an incantation, only the words that comprise this novel's title.

As Ella is drawn ever deeper into the couple's household, her presence unwanted but wholly necessary, she is profoundly moved by the tenderness Bryn shows toward the wife he still fiercely loves. Ella is startled by the yearning this awakens in her, one that complicates her feelings for her girlfriend, Alix, and causes her to look at relationships of all kinds - between partners, between employer and employee, and above all between men and women - in new ways.

Tightly woven, humane, and insightful, tracing unflinchingly the most intimate reaches of a young woman's heart and mind, Say Say Say is a riveting story about what it means to love, in a world where time is always running out.

©2019 Lila Savage (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Quietly wonderful...a rare novel. Ella [is] an unforgettable main character. Ms. Savage stages an inquiry into the conundrum of goodness in an age that does so little to reward it, yet needs it desperately. Where, she wonders, do you draw a line between selflessness and servility? The questions deepen in profundity and emotional power.... Say Say Say will likely make you cry, but in [this] novel such responses feel clean and ennobling, free from manipulation. It is a book written for the better angels of our nature. ‘Wasn’t there beauty in the practice of love and the roll and sweep of it?’ Ella thinks. Yes yes yes.” (Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal)

“Riveting, subversive.... Familial tensions feed Ella's richly articulate consciousness [in this] meditation on work, loss, intimacy, and desire." (Ottessa Moshfegh, GQ)

“Vivid; quietly radical - a wise, understated novel exploring the thoughts and feelings of a young carer as she steps into the crucible of other people’s suffering. The work is ‘pink collar’; the labor emotional and well as physical. Say Say Say is an intensely serious and careful book, which grapples with an unfashionable subject: the drive to be a good person, while wittily weighing human fallibility. The novel is particularly interesting about sexual politics and the romantic self: as a woke, young bisexual woman, Ella knows the effects of living in a patriarchy, but doesn’t know how to circumvent the damage. In the novel’s open-eyed, open-hearted curiosity, it illuminates both the intimate dramas usually hidden behind closed doors, and the shifting mysteries of personality and relationship.” (Justine Jordan, The Guardian)

too much navel gazing

Savage writes elegant prose, and there's something almost poetic in her fine details, but what seemed revelatory in the first few chapters felt repetitive by the middle and labored by the end. Ella lives so much in her head she seems almost narcissistic. Her self-scrutiny is hardly distinguishable from self-absorption, and her professions of love ultimately don't ring true.

beautiful!

A unique perspective. I've never heard anyone capture the details of what being a caregiver to strangers entails before. I'm an end of life caregiver & I feel seen in this writing.