I'd have a parasocial relationship with a hot poet too
Luiselli’s novel navigates the trials and tribulations of keeping her creativity alive while performing her motherly duties. She also explores just how blurred the lines between reality and imagination can become when one becomes obsessed with their means of escapism, which in her case is the poet Gilberto Owen. Through her movement through different liminal spaces and the switch between first-person narration, we see how the obsession consumes her. Her navigation of these spaces causes the reader a sort of confusion at first wondering what is real and what is imagined. I found this a tad bit hard to follow but found that it only added to the narrative of losing yourself in escape. Her fixation on Gilberto points to how we can form these fixed ideas of people who we don’t even know. The mother fabricates this image of him in her head, creating these encounters that never really happened. This reminded me of the parasocial relationships that people tend to form with celebrities. I ...