Unzipped (Nicki Reed, Text)

Peta refers to life before the couch and after the couch. Before the couch she is happily, if not blandly, married to workaholic lawyer Mark, half-heartedly toying with the idea of having a baby, and part of a happy extended family. After the couch she is pursuing a passionate affair with a 22-year-old female student named BJ. Unfortunately what sounds like a complicated romantic drama about how life rarely ends up where we think it will turns into a narrative of soap-operatic proportions. The characters—Peta, her foul-mouthed sister Ruby, and the dynamic BJ—all find themselves in a veritable Bold and the Beautiful relationship of twists and turns, and there is a certain emotional nuance lacking in the depiction of these characters and their often spur-of-the-moment decisions. A time of great emotional upheaval and passion is told in an almost perfunctory manner, making it difficult to connect with the characters and even harder to sympathise with them. Nicki Reed has assembled a colourful cast of characters and thrown them into some tricky emotional territory, but has utilised the shock value of brazen dialogue rather than the substance of really setting a scene or feeling. That said, the occasional references to various soap operas are fairly tongue-in-cheek and Unzipped can be an entertaining read.

 Portia Lindsay is a former bookseller who works at the NSW Writers’ Centre

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews