Good Material

“I’m instantly comforted by Frank Sinatra’s voice, the sound of every December. The kind of voice that lets you believe in an alternate world of luxury and elegance and romance and string orchestras.”

Music is essential to Andy’s life, and his mother plays Frank Sinatra for him as a comfort. The sensory language in the passage conveys the effect the music has on him as it invokes nostalgia, transporting Andy to the comfort of Christmastime.

“I cringed as I watched drunken thoughts tumble out of my mouth like Scrabble tiles and I tried to piece them together into clever observations.”

Using a simile, the passage compares Andy’s social awkwardness when he meets Jen for the first time with a board game, suggesting that Andy is not yet acting authentically as is instead playing by rules given to him. Ironically, Andy struggles with words since his vocation involves carefully constructing words for humorous effect.

“The extent of my self-pity means I am starting to feel sorry for my toothbrush and my record collection and my trousers. All alone in NW5, none the wiser. Not knowing what’s about to hit them.”

The passage personifies Andy’s items remaining at his and Jen’s shared apartment. The figurative language makes it appear like Andy’s belongings don’t yet know that the relationship is over, and he projects the same shock he had at the breakup onto them. This exemplifies Andy’s histrionic reactions to the breakup, which Alderton uses to construct the comedy of the text but also convey the pain of a breakup.

“I had organized the flowers, the hearse and the burial in one morning.”

After making plans to move in with Avi and Jane and store his belongings, Andy must process the reality of the breakup. He compares the process to planning a funeral, and as he will come to learn, processing the end of a romantic partnership is much like mourning a death.

“Every disappearing hair in that postcode renders a catastrophic loss on the overall asset.”

After the breakup, Andy becomes hyper-fixated on a balding patch at the back of his head. He chronicles the progression on his phone and determines that his hair loss diminishes his appearance and value as a partner. Alderton uses the financial language of “loss” and “asset” to suggest Andy’s struggles with Navigating Early Adulthood in the Modern World; while societal pressures dictate that Andy maintains his hair and becomes more wealthy as he gets older, neither applies to him.

“I want to take my mangled break-up in my mouth and drop it in front of them like a cat bringing in a bloodied mouse from the garden.”

Andy’s male friends struggle with expressing emotion, and when they go out for drinks to show support, Andy longs for them to reach through the awkwardness and ask him how he feels. The vivid metaphor conveys his desire for them to understand the weight of his grief and give it its due attention.

“[E]ven though Jen is no longer in my physical life, the room inside my mind that has been occupied by her for the last four years still exists. I want to convert it into a home gym or a meditation room or get in a new tenant, but I can’t.”

Using a metaphor to compare Andy’s grief process to improving a property articulates the difficulty he has moving on from the relationship. In this metaphor, Alderton comedically undermines tenets of wealthy Millennial living in London–a “home gym,” “meditation room,” or landlordism–and highlights the difficulties of attaining them.

“I’m an artist, this is what we do. We overanalyse. We masticate our misery until it’s pulverized enough to swallow.”

Andy recognizes that as a creative person, he feels things deeply and processes pain differently than others. The passage highlights Andy’s obsessive thought patterns viscerally by comparing how he processes pain to chewing.

“And then we met and fell in love and we introduced each other to all of it, like children showing each other their favourite toys.”

This passage uses a metaphor of children’s toys to connect Andy’s deep connection to Jen to his nostalgia for the past. Andy often compares things to toys, highlighting his inability to move on from things in his life. Comparing him and Jen to children allows Andy to understand why he is so attached to her. He experiences so many firsts with Jen that he finds it difficult to imagine life without her.

“I’ve never been here before, down in the cellar of the Daisy relationship, cracking open all the old vintages, swirling them around in a big wine glass, taking a deep sniff and having a drink for old times’ sake.”

Alcohol becomes a motif in the narrative, highlighting one of the ways Andy copes with his grief. In this passage, alcohol symbolizes nostalgia, comparing Andy’s memories of his relationship with Daisy to the smell of aged wine. However, revisiting his feelings about Daisy is just as dangerous as overindulging in alcohol.

“[S]ometimes we can disguise our real reasons for judgment with something we find easier to accept about ourselves.”

Despite Andy’s deceitful premise, the therapist still diagnoses his problem correctly. Her response is coincidental since he pretends to be someone else in the session. Her points about “disguise” highlight Andy as an unreliable narrator, since the narrative is filtered through his thoughts, and he cannot accept or express many of the difficult parts of his life.

“[I]t’s like I’ve hit Comedian Cruise Control and my mouth and body move of their own accord without any instruction from my brain.”

The figurative language highlights Andy’s career slump, conveying that he feels powerless over his creative energy. The alliteration reflects the habitual nature of Andy’s state.

“[A]ll middle-aged men are Peter Pans.”

Sophie alludes to the idea that, like the fictional character created by J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan, men don’t want to grow up and long to remain boys forever. For Andy, this rings true, as he can’t stop himself from aging, but he longs to stay in the halcyon days of his youth. Sophie’s designation of Andy as “middle-aged” even though he is 35 highlights the generational gap between them, since her perception is that he is older than he is.

“And I’m fine not to know myself too well at the moment, I’m not sure I’d like what I discovered.”

As the story progresses, Andy becomes increasingly more self-aware. He acknowledges his reluctance to excavate his feelings and expresses his low self-image. This hints most explicitly that Andy is an unreliable narrator, since he cannot rely on his own narration of himself.

“I think maybe I’m using it as this weird methadone while I detox from Jen.”

Andy compares being with Sophie to taking the drug that helps a person stop using opioids and other highly addictive substances. He realizes that he can’t heal from the breakup by using people or substances to help him cope.

“It’s like I’ve leant too hard on a shelf in a library and realized it’s a jib door that opens to a secret chamber. A whole wing of people, mingling with drinks at a party, talking only about you.”

Using a simile of leaning on a library door, this passage highlights Andy’s self-consciousness after discovering the negative online review and reading all the comments. Though seeing his act dragged through the mud online in a very public way is painful, the experience is the catalyst for Andy to take some risks and revamp his act.

“He shakes his body slightly, as if he can get rid of his feelings like rain drops on a coat.”

Like Andy, Jon is still in shock over his breakup. Andy can already see that Jon is uncomfortable with his feelings and wishes he could be rid of them, but Andy has learned from his experience and wants Jon to feel more at ease with vulnerability. The close narrative attention to the “slight” minutiae of Jon’s body highlights Andy’s growing desire to partake in and support emotional expression.

“You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.”

Andy’s mother’s wisdom highlights the human experience of loss. The passage employs repetition of “let go” to emphasize that the pain of losing a person is a long and nonlinear process.

“Feeling the absence of someone’s company and the absence of their love are two different things.”

Andy’s letter to Jon exemplifies his character growth throughout the story. His advice reveals that Andy has moved on from the shock and bitterness of grief to integrating the loss into his life. He can still appreciate his love for Jen without the unhealthy infatuation and obsession.

“He was clearly unaware of the expiration date marked ‘thirty-five’ that so many women think is slapped on them like a discounted chicken on display in a supermarket.”

In a metaphor, Jen succinctly expresses the plight of women in that they have a much shorter window of fertility than men and thus feel pressured to marry and have children before their window of opportunity closes. The comparison of women to poultry underscores the way men objectify women as wombs instead of whole people.

“He was an intimacy junkie and he wanted to be as close to me as possible.”

Language relating to substance abuse is prominent in the narrative. Here, Jen compares Andy’s intense connection to her with addiction, which she initially found attractive but became tiresome and emotionally draining over time.

“I was finally under the hood of a relationship, torch in hand, fiddling with the engine.”

Jen wanted to try being in a committed relationship to ascertain if it was what she wanted. Comparing herself to a mechanic taking apart a car to understand how it works conveys her desire to excavate her feelings fully.

“I’ve been doing what the elephants do. I’ve been scattering the bones of us and who we were together.”

In a full circle moment, Andy quotes from the book on elephant grief his mother gifted him early in the breakup. After going through his process of grief, he now better understands the book’s message and comprehends that he, too, was grieving a death.