I posted the spoiler-free review of Remember Me earlier, so what follows in this post is the spoiler-full analysis. As before, this is part of Sapphic Book Bingo 2023.
This goal of this post is not so much to analyze the book itself. Rather, it is to help fulfill my main purpose in participating in the Sapphic Book Bingo, which is to learn more about my own wants and values, hopefully in service of making it easier to write my own stories someday. As such, I expect this post to be more freeform than the previous one.
Just to make it clear one more time, what follows are SPOILERS for Remember Me by Syd Parker.
The Art of Romance
One of the main things I want to make sure I do during this bingo is record as much information as I can regarding how different authors explore and express romantic feelings, whether successfully or otherwise (in my view).
Hopefully I made it clear in my main review that I thought the romance between Sam and El was extreme, but I don't think the feelings in and of themselves weren't romantic. It still provided many moments that I felt were good examples of how to show that two characters love each other. None of these methods are really new to me, but seeing them take place in Remember Me gives me an opportunity to start documenting them for myself:
- Sharing in your partner's emotions, simply because that partner is experiencing those emotions. A way of seeing the partner as an extension of the self.
- Being willing to lower defenses and be vulnerable out of trust for your partner (though I've already written about vulnerabilty at length).
- More generally, being willing to go to lengths for your partner, or do things that you wouldn't do for just anyone.
- Accepting your feelings for your partner even if you don't understand them or know exactly what to do with them, simply because it's a good feeling.
- Supporting your partner, and your partner supporting you, through the specific traits that make you different from each other (I have also written at length about partners with opposite traits).
- Feeling a sense of fate bringing you and your partner together... though there's some issues with this that I'll cover in a little bit.
- Wanting EXTREMELY DESPERATELY to kiss your partner.
There's one moment in the book that I'm not sure about adding to the list. There was a passage that commented that Ellis could tell how Samantha felt about her, but was willing to be patient and wait for Samantha to express it herself. I thought this was sweet in its own way; it's a way of showing concern for boundaries. But on the other hand, it was also an example of the unnecessary lack of communication between the two about what they were feeling for each other. There are ways to show patience and respect for boundaries while also still being open and honest about your own feelings.
In addition to that, that particular moment fell apart for me later when it became clear Ellis wasn't actually feeling patient about any of this at all. And that point was representative of the main aspect of their relationship that did feel unromantic to me, which was that it was unstable. Both Sam and El's emotions kept wavering in and out, and they kept coming to new conclusions about what they should do about it. "I need to learn to live without her." "No, it's impossible for me to live without her." "But she could never love me." "But could she?" And like I said in the previous review, this eventually led to some very unromantic resentment between the two, the worst of it happening just before the climactic confession.
Obviously, even just a little bit of honest communication would've done a lot to clear these unnecessary doubts. But the book never really even acknowledges that this is the case; it's not just a matter of the characters making mistakes here, I feel like it just wasn't understood that there are other ways to keep drama and tension going. And so step one, "just talk to each other," doesn't happen until the end of the book, and then they go all the rest of the way immediately after that.
Bad Parents
One thing I want to do is take note of tropes as I run across them. It occurred to me, reading this book, that one trope I've already seen in several sapphic novels is "bad mom".
So far, at their least offensive, moms in sapphic novels have been nosy and haven't minded their own business. (Or in the case of the book I'm reading now, they're dead.) At their worst, i.e. in Remember Me, moms are manipulative and have no love for their daughters or anyone else.
Like I mentioned in my last review, this is something I relate to a lot. I don't even really need to go into specifics, I pretty much just described it right there. The only thing Remember Me's mom does worse than my own is that she's implied to be physically abusive, and from my perspective, that also means that it's easier to understand that she's in the wrong.
Anyway. If "terrible moms" are a common sapphic experience, then I can certainly draw from my own experiences to fuel a story, or an arc within a story. I'm honestly kinda disappointed that I haven't seen more sapphic stories do this already. They usually acknlowedge that the mom has harmed the protagonist on some level, but it's not usually what much of the book is about. I think it'd be satisfying to see a storyline where a bad mom is taken to task.
Remember Me is definitely not that book. The mom in Remember Me disowns her own mother for being a lesbian, prevents her daughter from contacting her mother for this same reason, and eventually threatens to assault her daughter for being a lesbian in the final chapter. Then, in the epilogue, she provides an olive branch in the form of an old photo of grandma and accompanies it with an "I'm sorry, I'll do better :(" Fuck off.
I get that abusers are often allowed sort of a rushed apology followed by a rushed acceptance at the end of some stories because it's *reads notes* "narratively satisfying". I guess it's a way of sending the message that yes, the protagonist was right and the villain was wrong, see even the previous villain agrees, so we're all on the same page about this and we don't have to worry about the protagonist not getting everything they want. But when it comes to cruelty like this, I just feel like that's a fantasy we can't afford to have. People this bad never apologize and change this quickly, and they are never owed forgiveness by the people they hurt. I wish this perspective was the more common one.
On the other side, the book portrays the dad as being actually good. Shortly after the mom is introduced, he's introduced as well, and it's made clear that he's not on the same page as mom. He always thought it would've been better if Sam had gotten to know her grandmother. He encourages Sam to go take this trip for herself, even though she works for him and, again, mom doesn't approve. It's also implied that he sees the chemistry between Sam and El and is waiting for them to get together with each other.
Here's the thing though. Supposedly the dad is on board and supportive of all this stuff. WHY didn't he say anything about this in the thirty years that mom had her thumb on Sam's life? To me, this dad is not a character to be trusted and admired, as the book presents him to be. This is a coward.
Though this, too, is something I relate to. I had my own ineffectual dad growing up. Maybe that's a common experience among sapphics, too. In the case of my own dad, I think he's just not very observant of the world around him, maybe including his own wife. I don't hate him like I hate my mom. I feel sorry for him on a certain level. But I don't admire or love him. I never saw him as someone I could confide in, either, like I thought my mom was.
In addition to the dad, there's a few other cases of characters withholding information from the protagonists, I guess under the premise that it will be better for the protagonists if they just figure things out for themselves. But the thing is, that kind of hands-off parenting technique stops being okay when there is a manipulator nearby actively preventing someone from reaching the truth or doing what makes them happy. The hands-off technique is no longer about trusting the child to make their own decisions, it's about enabling someone else to make decisions for the child instead.
Anyway. Like I said, I feel like I could explore these themes and ideas more thoroughly in a story of my own. I don't know if it's something I want to do yet, but I'll definitely consider it.
Other themes and concepts I'd like to explore more in my own stories
- As I mentioned in the last review, I do like the focus on gaining independence and following your heart. I also like that it acknowledges some of the common things that get in the way of that, such as not understanding your own feelings, worrying about losing the support of those around you, and worrying about other potential unknown (or known) life changes. I like how it shows that sometimes instinct leads you in the direction of indpendence even when you don't know that's what it's doing. I think all these are important topics to queer people especially, and I'd like to explore them more in my own stories.
- I've mentioned the concept of "fate" a few times. In Remember Me, this is accomplished through love at first sight, the chemistry being obvious to everyone that Sam and El encounter, and connections to family history (both Sam and her grandmother fell in love with women). I know there's a certain comfort associated with the idea that you are guaranteed to achieve something that is fundamentally important to you, a romantic relationship especially. But in real life, there's a lot of danger in relying on that idea, and even in a fictional world, it's not as simple as just being an inherently good thing. There's... elements of authoritarianism inherent in the idea, to put it bluntly. This is a concept I'd like to explore in greater detail at some point, too.
- Somewhat early in the story, Sam and El spend some time with a family at a dog rescue site. This family is not directly connected to Sam or El in any way, but it was still relevant to the story in the sense that it was another example of characters following their hearts. I like the idea of taking small breaks from the main plot to look at other chracters' lives simply for the sake of offering new perspectives on the themes of the story. That's something I'd like to be able to do in my own writing, too.
- Nearly every character in the story was empathetic to the point where they might as well have been able to read people's minds. In the book, this was taken to such an extreme that it just made things weird, with every character offering the same basic paternalistic advice to Sam and El about their relationship. But I liked the idea of each character being able to empathize with others in their own ways; I like characters thinking about each other and talking about each other. I also liked that Sam and El had their own ways of doing it, El just by reading expressions, and Sam by measuring handshakes. I'd like to explore empathetic interpretation and communication in similar ways.
- Though Grandma Louise passes away at the beginning of the story, a point is made near the end that Sam is still able to communicate with her in a certain sense, by talking to the friends that knew Louise when she was still alive. I like this idea and I'd like to explore other aspects of what it means for someone to "exist" or have presence in the world than simply physically living in it.
- It's a small thing, but at one point there was a scene at night that was described as having the sounds of cicadas filling the air. I just really like that kind of atmosphere. I like nighttime aesthetics. It wasn't central to the story at all, but it stood out to me enough to make me keep in mind that I have my own aesthetics I'd like to explore.
Odds and ends
- This is the second "toaster oven" romance I've read, i.e., a romance where a protagonist starts off believing she's straight, but falls for another woman by the end. Both books have taken the route of the character just not really making much of her sexuality until she suddenly realizes how passionate she is for her best friend. Which is making me wonder, how many of these "converted lesbians" are actually just demisexuals who don't know what that word means?
- Although so far it's seemed to me to be a common thing to have sapphic novels switch perspectives between the protagonists, usually it's on a chapter-by-chapter basis. In Remember Me, the perspective will change without warning multiple times in the same chapter. The consistent rule seems to be that the current perspective is whichever character is currently speaking or taking some other sort of action, and eventually this includes side characters with only a small connection to the main story. I eventually got used to it, but it was weird and I'm still not sure I'm on board with it as a narrative technique.
- This story confirmed that I don't care about baseball. Fortunately there wasn't a ton of it, but I zoned out whenever characters started talking about how cool it is (and how proud it made them to be women, apparently??). However, I have been informed that some sports stories can successfully work around that kind of disinterest in sports. Well, this one didn't.
- And maybe it is an issue with the story, because there were a lot of dogs in the story and I didn't care about them, either, even though I generally like animals. They just didn't seem to do a whole lot other than stereotypical dog things. Animals have individual personalities, too, you know?
- Something that crossed my mind a few times throughout the story is that I could do with more practice in picturing events using all five senses. You know, just the occasional passage where characters take in the sights, smells, and feels of things, if they happen to be noteworthy or significant. It's not something I notice happen a lot, though, so I guess I don't need to worry about it too much.
How would I have written it differently?
This is a section I hope to repeat for the other books in this challenge. A thought experiment, again, to help me conceive of my own stories.
From the ground up, though, the simple answer is that I would not have written a story about going on a road trip to receive a baseball-related inheritance. I also probably wouldn't have written a story about uncovering family history unless the family history in question was awful, or the family members were the actual protagonists of the story.
A road trip, by itself, is not a bad setting for a love story, though. It provides plenty of time for awkward conversations and learning new things about each other with each stop along the way. There's ample opportunity to introduce any number of extra complications to the story, too, depending on what happens at each stop. In general, it's a good setup for slowly discovering new things, which I like.
The focus of this story wasn't really on the road trip itself, though. Or at least I didn't feel like it was. All in all, this story just didn't represent the same kinds of goals I'd hope to achieve as an author, so I have trouble picturing my own "version" of it.