Book Review (Fiction): Still Me

Still Me

Jojo Moyes

Michael Joseph 2018 472 Pages

As the blurb on the back cover put it, Louisa Clark knows many things. And in Jojo Moyes’ Still Me, she’s getting to know a whole lot more - as an expatriate Englishwoman in New York.

Much less sentimental than previous outings Me Before You (2012) and After You (2015), this latest installment in the adventures of much-loved character “Lou” sees her separated from new beau Ambulance Sam by the breadth of the Atlantic. As an “agony assistant” to Agnes Gopnik, a wealthy American’s second wife, she initially experiences a giddy whirl of shopping, cocktails, glittering society events and so on.

But the needy Agnes, a former physical therapist, has issues with her old money husband’s family who despise her as an arriviste Polish gold-digger. Apart from her abundant physical attractions, this truly awful creation is a high-maintenance, petulant, selfish and melodramatic diva; with a genius for creating problems for everyone around her. Two seemingly cantankerous crones, the hostile housekeeper Ilaria and the unsympathetic neighbour Mrs DeWitt, turn out to have the true measure of her. Considering Agnes treats Lou like a slave, causes her to lose her job and wrongly thought to be a criminal, this irritating drama queen gets off quite lightly and escapes a well-deserved comeuppance.

Unjustly ejected from the Gopnik ménage, Lou finds salvation as a temporary live-in companion to the aforementioned Mrs DeWitt who proves to have hidden depths that belie her acerbic manner. In her briskly unsentimental get-on-with-it attitude, she even seems more typically British than open, emotional Louisa!

The characters who really shine in Still Me are supporting players like the Indian-origin concierge Ashok and his boisterous clan and Lydia, the gum-chewing proprietor of a vintage clothes store. Aided, in part, by these unlikely allies, our heroine engineers a remarkable recovery from adversity. It is to the credit of the author that she avoids a neat Cinderella-style deus ex machina with a potential American Prince Charming (who even physically resembles lost love Will Traynor in Me Before You) but proves ultimately incompatible with free-spirited eccentric fashionista Louisa.

While she isn’t always able to avoid facile tear-jerking, Moyes keeps this voyage of self-discovery engaging and the reader invested in her lively heroine’s progress.

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