I picked up a copy of “Loved One” based solely on the fact that its first-time author, Aisha Muharrar, was involved in three television comedies that made me laugh: “Hacks,”“Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place.”
The opening scene of “Loved One” could be a set piece on any of those shows, as we jump inside the head of our narrator, 30-year-old Julia, who is delivering the eulogy at a friend’s funeral, a popular indie musician at the time of his death. She thinks in pop culture tropes. “Gabe and I were actual friends… We weren’t the kind of friends who were never really friends. The kind of friends you see in a romantic comedy where there are two incredibly attractive people who are deeply emotionally invested in each other, and we’re supposed to believe they have never once considered the idea of sexual intercourse.”
Julia next goes to the bathroom and ends up needing to borrow a tampon from Elizabeth, a British woman Gabe had been dating for more than a year at the time of his accidental death. (He slipped and hit his head on a marble sink when exiting the shower of an L.A. hotel.) Elizabeth’s words to Julia in their brief bathroom encounter set the rest of the story in motion: “I know exactly who you were to Gabe.”
After some required background about how Julia and Gabe met at a program for arts and architectural students in Barcelona in the summer between high school and college, Julia is on her way to London to retrieve a few of Gabe’s things at the request of Gabe’s grieving mother. “I was a set of house keys buried at the bottom of a purse, finally plucked out, jangling with a purpose,” is the poetic way Muharrar describes Julia’s feelings as she heads overseas.
Once in London, the story takes on an almost buddy comedy feel, with Julia and Elizabeth warily befriending one another as they attempt to collect mementos of Gabe’s — from a guitar he once played to a Mets cap he wore. We stay inside Julia’s head most of the time, as she travels around London, still delivering inner monologues wrapped in her pop-culture sensibility: “I liked learning a new tidbit about him. It was never-before-seen footage that kept the movie of his life rolling.”
As the two women get to know one another, we as readers get to know more about their relationships with Gabe, and especially what happened in the final month or so before his death. Muharrar’s work developing her main characters throughout the story allows her to explore deeper themes of grief and loss in the final third of the book without too much sentimentality. Closure may be too much to ask for these grieving women, but it’s enough that they realize they still have lives to live without the object of the book’s title.
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