Why do stories matter? This is a question I didn’t used to have an answer to. I knew I liked stories, both as a listener and as a teller. I’ve thought about good stories as full of powerful messages that could travel great distances and have lives beyond their intentions. However, after reading “Topics of Conversation” by Miranda Popkey, I’ve begun to see stories in a different light. Now, I see the power inherent in telling a story at all.

“Topics of Conversation” is a book by recent Washington University Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Writing graduate Miranda Popkey, and it is the story of an unnamed narrator “hungry for experience and bent on upending her life.” It is told through conversations almost entirely between women. The women that the narrator listens to at different stages of life give incredible droplets of wisdom and the profound meaning inside what may seem like stories of love, pain, and failure. They talk about marriage, motherhood, violence, loss, desire and so much more in a way that seems so intimate yet so remote.

We as readers know so little about these characters in a practical way but so much about their darkest secrets and deepest fears. These women gain an incredible power in the telling of these stories. They become charged with this sort of attraction, like a magnet. We lean in to listen, just as the narrator does. Before, they could have been ordinary. Through the story, they become beautiful and important and wise.

The narrator herself is unconventional in many ways. She makes many choices that at a surface level are fairly unlikable. However, we still root for her and engage in her journey, despite how easy it would be to condemn. She is a flawed person, who makes rash decisions and seems desperate for romantic unhappiness and instability. She strives continually for an ideal, but doesn’t seem to know what exactly the ideal is. She judges her friends and her family and she resents those that are happy and fulfilled. Yet, she is at the same time deeply sympathetic because she is so vulnerable with us as readers. We have a vantage point from the inside of her head without knowing many real facts about her. We know her by proxy, by the people and places she knows. We feel drawn to this chaotic figure and compelled to help her find peace.

As a young woman who has just entered my 20s, I see myself in many ways in the narrator at the beginning of the novel. I see myself in that idealism, in that confusion and fear of the permanence of all of the decisions I am making. I know that messy idea of love and the desire to have it all done and settled. In many ways, the later chapters of the book exemplify my anxiety about what awaits me in real adulthood, when my ambition has faded and irrelevance is setting in.

But this book showed me that life is a continuous process of landing. Womanhood is so tied up in performing perfection, but it doesn’t have to be so perfect all the time. This narrator is often confused. She often fails, lets down herself and the people she loves. Yet, life goes on and beauty and clarity is found, not regardless of the chaos but due to the chaos. These stories have that power: to connect people to each other and to themselves