It’s taken me days to recover from the realization that I missed that this book purported to be written by one of the characters as her M.F.A. thesis. I only learned about that from talking to Jennifer when I had just finished the book. I listened to the beginning of the book again and yes, right at the beginning it says it was written by Robbie for her thesis. One of her motivations was to attack the professor married to her faculty adviser on whom she had a crush. So to sum up, there’s academic infighting, satirizing the world of academia, steamy sex, and there’s an unreliable witness.
It begins with a third person narrative which we should remember is actually written by the unreliable witness. It describes the power couple of the creative writing department, Simone, a beautiful person and talented writer and her husband Ethan, untenured with a book written years before. A spark between Ethan and Abigail, the department secretary occurs at an end-of-year departmental party when he offers her a cigarette. They sleep together when he was visiting his home town and she was there visiting her father. While he was gone, Simone invites Robbie to run with her and sleep on her couch and although there’s attraction, nothing happens. We now know some or all of this happened.
It is only in the second chapter that Robbie speaks in her own voice. While I thought it was interesting to have a mix of third person and first person narratives, it did not occur to me to doubt the veracity of the third person account which recounts details Robbie could not have known. Does this make me feel better about not realizing the big picture structure? A little, but not much!
A big clue that I chose to ignore was that the last chapter was a rewrite of the chapter before. They were different versions of the story of the her thesis defense; in the first version she destroyed the reputations of Ethan and Simone, which Ethan characterized as revenge porn read aloud by Simone’s mistress. The department chair begins rummaging around for termination letters, Title IX complaint forms, insurance claims, customer satisfaction surveys. Simone calls the book a masterpiece and says that Robbie has bewitched her as a woman.
The next chapter begins, “Just kidding” and begins the description of the thesis defense again, a happy business for all concerned that ended well.
Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory, Little, Brown and Company, 2025, 213 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.