The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop

The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop, Black Cat/Grove Atlantic, New York, 2023. 423 pages, $18.



Review by Ed Meek



If you are making a list for summer reading, you can’t do much better than The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop. It’s a novel that combines a deep dive into writing with a mystery. As a work about writing, Anniversaryfits into what is becoming a genre. We appear to like pulling back the curtain to see how the wizard does it. Recent examples include Vladimir by Julia May Jonas in which a writer confronts political correctness at the college while seducing a younger man, Mona by Pola Oloixarac in which a writer attends a writing conference while trying to figure out what caused the bruises on her body. Then there’s the HBO series This May Destroy You about a writer trying to get to the bottom of a rape she can’t quite remember while completing a manuscript. And before that, Girls where Lena Dunham’s character, a writer, and her friends deal with toxic males while trying to survive in NYC.

The Anniversary is about a woman writer who has just found out that she is receiving a prestigious prize for her new novel. Maybe it’s the Booker Prize or even a Pulitzer (she doesn’t say). This comes after years of working in the shadow of her famous husband who makes award winning films. He is twenty years older. She met him as a student of his and he became her husband and her mentor. As long as she is unsuccessful, he is very supportive but when she begins to rival him and maybe even surpass him in stature, he has a difficult time with it. Sound familiar? This is a well-worn plot. In the appropriately titled movie Shallow, Bradley Cooper nurtures the unknown Lady Gaga until she belts out a few showstopping numbers and upstages him causing him to fall into a downward spiral. In The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (a great novel and film about writing) the main character, (Michael Douglas in the film) is outshined by one of his students at the annual college writing festival.

For their anniversary, our narrator decides to take her husband on a romantic cruise to get their relationship back on track. I’m not giving anything away to say that after a round of great sex and too much alcohol, a storm at sea arises and her husband Patrick ends up going over the railing from the upper deck into the cold waters of the ocean in the middle of the night! Even the narrator is somewhat unsure of what really happened. The next few hundred pages are spent delving into her past, her family history, and her relationship with her husband, in order to figure out what happened and how she arrived at this juncture in time.

Her relationship with her husband happens to involve collaborative writing. She helps him with his films; he helps her with her novels. Bishop is good at explaining how collaboration can work and what the narrator’s writing process entails. She brings up questions about the reliability and unreliability of our memory and the connection between fiction and reality. Much of the narrator’s writing is closely based on real life and that can cause problems. Hemingway is reputed to have lost half a dozen famous friends when The Sun Also Risescame out. There’s an old axiom: be careful what you say to a writer. It may end up in a story. The narrator’s perspective is different from her husband’s and it is the basis for conflict.

In addition, the story we tell ourselves affects our perspective on life. A new movement in psychology involves retelling your own story in order to help you to accept yourself and your fate. If you are always berating yourself for not living up to your standards or your mother’s or father’s or society’s, maybe you just need to change the narrative. In The Anniversary, the narrator, Ms. Blackwood, finds her perspective on herself, and her husband shifting and that changes both the past and the present.

Bishop does a great job withholding information to keep us turning the pages though you might find yourself skimming some of her paragraphs that may have benefitted from trimming. She is also good at tying together the many loose ends she creates. Mark Twain said: “The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.” Mysteries often strain our sense of credibility, and Bishop runs into problems when she leaves the world of writing and ventures into the world of law. But these days, when the real world has become pretty iffy—did ChatGPT write this? Is Tik Tok used for spying? Was Michelle Carter responsible for her boyfriend’s suicide because she sent him a text? You may not care to quibble about reality when it comes to this smart, entertaining novel.