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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

SAY SAY SAY

Lila Savage

Ella is nearing thirty, and not yet living the life she imagined. Her artistic ambitions as a student in Minnesota have given way to an unintended career in caregiving. One spring, Bryn--a retired carpenter--hires her to help him care for Jill, his wife of many years. A car accident caused a brain injury that has left Jill verbally diminished; she moves about the house like a ghost of her former self, often able to utter, like an incantation, only the words that comprise this novel's title.

As Ella is drawn ever deeper into the couple's household, her presence unwanted but wholly necessary, she is profoundly moved by the tenderness Bryn shows toward the wife he still fiercely loves. Ella is startled by the yearning this awakens in her, one that complicates her feelings for her girlfriend, Alix, and causes her to look at relationships of all kinds--between partners, between employer and employee, and above all between men and women--in new ways.

Tightly woven, humane and insightful, tracing unflinchingly the most intimate reaches of a young woman's heart and mind, Say Say Say is a riveting story about what it means to love, in a world where time is always running out.

Lila Savage is originally from Minneapolis. Prior to writing fiction, she spent nearly a decade working as a caregiver. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship and graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2018.

(A Chris Parris-Lamb book for The Gernert Company)
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Published 2019-07-01 by Knopf

Comments

"Say Say Say will likely make you cry, but this is a rare novel in which such responses feel clean and ennobling, free from manipulation. It is a book written for the better angels of our nature."

“Luminous . . . A startling, tender debut. [As] Ella, a young caregiver, finds herself gradually immersed in Bryn and Jill's lives, her role as Jill's companion evolves into something more intimate and complex . . . What Ella witnesses between [the couple] challenges her ideas of love, spirituality, and empathy. Quietly forceful, Say Say Say will stay with readers long after the final page.” (starred, boxed review) Read more...

"A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Wallace Stegner Fellow, Savage herself spent almost a decade working as a caregiver, and her insight into this fraught and intimate profession comes through on every page in incisive and beautiful language. The third-person narration is intensely reflective and psychologically revelatory."

A luminous debut Read more...

“Riveting, subversive . . . Familial tensions feed Ella's richly articulate consciousness [in this] meditation on work, loss, intimacy, and desire." (Ottessa Moshfegh) Read more...

"A gem of a book. A lyrical, tender, and profoundly insightful dive into the act of caregiving and its highly charged nexus of love, duty, and longing. Lila Savage is an enormous talent; Say Say Say is a mesmerizing tour de force." —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone "Say Say Say is something quite special, unlike anything else I've ever read. Lila Savage's voice is distinctive, perhaps the timbre of a new generation—its deadpan; its fascination with randomness and accident; its lack of interest in making rounded meaning. I love the way Ella's intense thoughts and feelings on one page are contradicted by different intense thoughts and feelings (and certainties) a few pages later. Which is like life. Yet there's no show of anomie or alienation, no effort to shock (even though the material is shocking). Lila Savage's imagination is warm and generous. Her novel is haunting, original, intelligent." —Tessa Hadley, author of The Past "Caregivers occupy a unique role during life's most fraught times. Despite being strangers, they quickly become central within a family, working to temper a patient's illness and debility while affirming her dignity. Lila Savage, through the experience of the caregiver Ella, vividly illuminates what sustains us when facing suffering and loss: relationships based on trust, honesty, humility and, most of all, the tenacity of love. Say Say Say stirs the reader's mind and heart, and resonates long after the book is closed." —Jerome Groopman, MD, author The Anatomy of Hope "I cannot think when I Iast read a novel which moved me so deeply. Savage is almost supernaturally alert to the little gestures and transactions we all make as we negotiate our place in the world, and our relations to each other. Her approach is both unflinching and extraordinarily tender, so that I came away feeling I had undergone an examination which was somehow both painful and kind. I loved it, and it has remained with me in a way few other books have ever done." —Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent "Powerful, thought-provoking—an impressive and affecting debut that had me reflecting on compassion, gender roles—and what it means to love." —Claire Fuller, author of Swimming Lessons "Brilliant, compelling—an extraordinarily good book, one that allows you deep into someone else's world. I loved that it's about a relationship that wasn't a partner or lover relationship, but one that is nevertheless very intimate. Say Say Say is a joy to read." —Philippa Perry, author of How to Stay Sane " Lila's observations on the ordinary lives of one carer and one couple living with the wake of a devastating brain injury between them are breathtaking; raw, powerful and pivotally, unabashed. Her writing is effortlessly absorbed. Say Say Say asks what exactly it can mean to love, when you care for life's most vulnerable people and the answer is both devastating and beautiful." —Aoife Abbey, author of Seven Signs of Life

Interview with Lila Savage about her own experiences as a caregiver and how that inspired her writing of this novel Read more...

“Poetic, elegant. . . Lila Savage's novel Say Say Say transport[s] you—and it teaches several valuable lessons: How to be present with grace and dignity. How not to look away. How life goes on. It begins when Ella, a Minnesota-artist-turned caregiver in her 20s is hired by a retired carpenter to take care of his wife, Jill, who suffered a head injury. Ella is well trained in the awkward two-step of gently inserting herself into a family at its most difficult time. Savage follows the opposite arcs of these two women with such kindness (that's the only word for it), even the most difficult moments of the story feel buffered by grace.”

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