Lucky Girl - Completed

She's a banker's kid and she won't stop moaning about gentrification
She's all about smashing the patriarchy and she can't handle the fact that Evie hasn't kissed a boy in a while
Gimme a break!!


seriously, you created a terrific character there :)

Even if they are pretentious and hypocritical. Oh Evie, why are you drawn to such people?

Evie attracts people that want to meddle in her love life. People! Leave her alone! Stop pestering her and let her move at her own pace. I feel Evie's discomfort at trying to fit into the city life. I was raised in a rural area, but I have always been a city girl at heart. The downside of city life is it's fast paced, frantic even, and people don't have a lot of patience with those that don't understand how it works. She'll be fine though.

Marnie is a walking contradiction for sure - I've known people like this and it baffles me. Have you no self-awareness?? I think maybe the question isn't why is Evie drawn to these people, but why they're drawn to someone like her? Surely it's easier to surround yourself with agreeable people who will let you get away with anything you do... :wink:

They DO need to leave her alone re: love life though, I think that's such a thing when you're young though - everyone is just comparing themselves to others, what they've done, what they haven't, it feels like a giant game of "never have I ever".

Adjusting to a city can be really daunting, because everything seems to have different rules. It can be great, but there's always that Oh my gosh - what is going on here??? period.

Overall, I found the outing with Jude to the cemetery/abandoned church to be kind of sweet. Unlike other readers, I didn't get any feeling of danger. But my personality is an odd combination of people-pleasing and i-am-going-to-do-whatever-i-want. By the time I was 13, I stopped getting in trouble with my parents and when I was 16 - 18 of course I wouldn't go anywhere I didn't want to go so maybe I'm less likely to see Jude as controlling. Because Evie can open her mouth and tell him that she wants him to stop fooling around and take her home at any time, Jude didn't bother me here. Ideally, he should communicate more, but he's young too so I imagine he's a bit thoughtless. I also had a good group of friends growing up so if any guy did anything shady or malicious, he would be 100% instantly outcast, embarrassed, and lose everything, jeopardizing his entire future. My main concern would have been let's not get in trouble for trespassing and let's not get hurt (because we don't want to have to explain dumb teenage behavior to a doctor/parents/others and look like fools ("Oh yeah, my friend turned off the only light available while we were in this abandoned falling apart church in the middle of the night to see some stained glass window and talk about ghosts...")).

I should add that I like your writing style. It's nice and atmospheric. This chapter shows it quite well.

When I wrote this chapter, I was reflected on an experience I'd had around Evie's age - i think I mentioned that earlier in the thread, and for me, it was a sweet and exciting experience. I didn't really think about how an adult might see it, but I guess that's always going to happen when you're sharing a story. Everybody sees things totally uniquely, no matter what the subject matter is, there are no two people who will come to it with the exact same feelings. I'm learning to let go of control of the narrative and how it comes across, because I just can't make anybody read into it the way that I want them to - it's actually really interesting. Lots of people will think that Evie and Jude's situation is frightening, and I completely understand why, but it's the kind of dumb thing lots of kids would do without thinking about the consequences of it. I'm coming back to unexpected cultural differences again and again to my surprise. I don't know if we were brought up with the same stranger-danger caution in Ireland as in other countries. Crime is so low, bad things rarely happen. My friends and I ran wild back in the 00s/10s and nobody seemed to care.

It sounds like you had some great, protective friends around you when you were growing up, and you were wise to feel that way about trespassing and getting hurt - it'd sound so dumb to try and explain to an adult what your thought process was that brought you to such a strange place. I guess you live and learn there things..

Thank you very much for that!

...that Evie was in any danger with Jude. It would have been a sudden turn of events if Jude turned out to be a maniac or violent and the whole tone of Lucky Girl would be VERY different! What I don't like about Jude is that he takes decisions on behalf of other people, especially Evie, without asking if it's something she wants to do. She wanted to go home, he decided on the detour to the church without telling her. He does a lot of things like that but, as we see, part of that is down to his upbringing and his parents. Not that I'm not invested in his character either; he's compelling nonetheless. It could be that he thinks that the man must take charge, must make the decisions and given that he's treated by everyone else as talented, special and a cut above the rest it just feeds this belief in him.

...but maybe it's because, when I was that age, I was jealous of guys like him.

"hellohannah2;c-18217398" wrote:
@haneul I know that feeling - I'm so so bad at keeping up with stories, life gets in the way, you have to read at your own pace.
When I wrote this chapter, I was reflected on an experience I'd had around Evie's age - i think I mentioned that earlier in the thread, and for me, it was a sweet and exciting experience. I didn't really think about how an adult might see it, but I guess that's always going to happen when you're sharing a story. Everybody sees things totally uniquely, no matter what the subject matter is, there are no two people who will come to it with the exact same feelings. I'm learning to let go of control of the narrative and how it comes across, because I just can't make anybody read into it the way that I want them to - it's actually really interesting. Lots of people will think that Evie and Jude's situation is frightening, and I completely understand why, but it's the kind of dumb thing lots of kids would do without thinking about the consequences of it. I'm coming back to unexpected cultural differences again and again to my surprise. I don't know if we were brought up with the same stranger-danger caution in Ireland as in other countries. Crime is so low, bad things rarely happen. My friends and I ran wild back in the 00s/10s and nobody seemed to care.

I definitely understand why it may be frightening to some as well. Exploring an abandoned building sounds like a fun, dumb thing kids would do. I would have wanted to do it too... haha. I'm not sure if I would have, but I would have considered it because I was always up for an adventure. I wanted to say that I was in a low crime area as well, but my friends and I also traveled places where crime wasn't so low (NYC) and still acted the same. Maybe MZ generation feels a bit safer about these things because we've grown up with cell phones, it's fairly easy to keep track of where someone is, and the culture is at least slightly less victim-blamey.

I want to give Evie a shot of self-confidence, some youthful exuberance: Jude is too hot for her, she doesn't want him to see her books or her art... He's absolutely not and her books/art are fine. I wish her friends and family would rally around her more so that she doesn't feel so small.

I think about how I do. I’m a clinger and I always have been, so his philosophy on life is totally foreign to me, just like the idea of jetting off to some unknown city all on my own without speaking the language or knowing how a single thing in its society operates. I think that he’s much braver than I am for doing it, but I’m a little sad that he’s going. Maybe in a parallel universe he and I would have attended the same art college and been friends who hung around in Dublin together after our respective classes, sitting outside coffee shops in the city and talking about art and sculpture and our silly assignments, but none of that will happen. In a few weeks he’ll be gone forever and I will likely never get to see him again.

Perhaps she's just a realist, but it's interesting to me that her imagination is so limited. She can travel too - it doesn't have to be scary and one can always learn something of a city's language and society before visiting it (go to the library, pick up a book, do a Google search, etc.). Why would she never see him again? He could invite her to hang out in Berlin. It's not that far.

Of course, my own background continues to influence how I read this. Since I was about 12 years old, it was clearly understood at school that everyone would be going different places for college. The idea of everyone staying in the same place or generally staying together was never a thing (if the whole city sends only 5 people to X uni., it's pretty clear we all can't go there - some people will need to go to Y uni. or Z uni...). So to not be weird or sad about it, by the time high school was ending, we planned to visit one another randomly (when the flights were cheap!) and get together when everyone returned for holidays. Maybe we would have sounded a bit like Jude, like where we were was somehow not good enough or that we were too good to stay. I imagine that can become a touchy subject quite quickly.

I look forward to getting to the chapters where I get more insight into his personality and his family background.

So yes, her worldview is limited, and I can see why that might be surprising, but later on in the story I'll touch on class and privilege a bit more, why might explain her mindset. Yes, Berlin is close, but her visiting him would depend on him actually wanting her to come and see him. At this point in her story she doesn't know what he thinks about her, and doesn't really think that he'd bother asking her. She feels it's a one sided thing - she thinks he's too hot for her, too smart too popular, and just because she's interested in him doesn't mean he's interested back. Maybe he hangs out with girls in their bedrooms all the time, how would she know how these things are supposed to work?

There's definitely a different feeling towards university here, when I first started watching films from the US where characters go to college I was surprised by how far they would travel for a school - the idea of having to get a flight there seemed very scary too me.
Dublin is now one of the least affordable cities in the world, but a decade ago everybody moved there for college. It was basically the only acceptable choice, with 3 large universities and dozens and dozens of smaller colleges all within an hour maximum trip of each other, it was kind of expected that you'd end up being around everyone you knew. it was definitely a very exotic choice to study abroad, the attitude being, well, why would I go there when everything I need is here? Jude's break from the expectation really just felt like what his character would naturally do. Whether it's because he thinks he's too good for Ireland or because he's just yearning for something more is the question. I wish it had been more normal to study abroad, maybe it's something I would have enjoyed!

"hellohannah2;c-18217692" wrote:

So yes, her worldview is limited, and I can see why that might be surprising, but later on in the story I'll touch on class and privilege a bit more, why might explain her mindset. Yes, Berlin is close, but her visiting him would depend on him actually wanting her to come and see him. At this point in her story she doesn't know what he thinks about her, and doesn't really think that he'd bother asking her. She feels it's a one sided thing - she thinks he's too hot for her, too smart too popular, and just because she's interested in him doesn't mean he's interested back. Maybe he hangs out with girls in their bedrooms all the time, how would she know how these things are supposed to work?

This is why I so badly want to give Evie some confidence. She can have a hot, smart, and popular boyfriend (who is hopefully kind and considerate of her as well). It may not be Jude, but hot, smart, and popular are things that she can have.

I got that she wasn't confident in his feelings for her yet, but by this point, they're friends? Now that I think about it and her personality a bit more, they would probably need to be more than casual friends for her to take a trip to Berlin. She's not a jetsetter, so it wouldn't make sense for him to say, "If you come to Berlin, let's meet up." Casually traveling around is also a very privileged thing to do.

it was definitely a very exotic choice to study abroad, the attitude being, well, why would I go there when everything I need is here?

I don't want to make this a US-thing because not all of the US is like this and it's also not just the US, but there's an upper middle class attitude of "I'm going to X uni. because it's the best in the world (or at least top 10 in the world at) ... It makes no sense to stay here and study at a mediocre place. Why would I settle for less than the best I can get?" A lot of countries (including the US) have a really messy college/university system where acceptance rates are 4% - 7% at certain schools and it creates an interesting/toxic/less than ideal culture around education in some communities, but on the flip side, it also creates some independence and a willingness to study abroad and adventure around. For those in relationships like Jude and his ex, they can realistically hope for the same city, but when universities are handing out rejections all over the place, it would be hard for them to feel comfortable planning (instead of simply hoping and praying) to go to the same university. Everyone has to have a plan to go alone or with a new friend or two from their city or country they just met and who is also going.