Tennis Lessons
Tennis Lessons (Doubleday, 2020) is the debut novel by Susannah Dickey, a writer from Derry now living in Belfast and a Ph.D. student at the Seamus Heaney Center at Queen’s University. She is a published poet, having work printed in Poetry Ireland Review, Ambit, Magma, and others. She also has three poetry pamphlets: I had some very slight concerns (2017), genuine human values (2018), and blood-thirsty for marriage (2020). When writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop. On the back cover, we are told of Tennis Lessons:
From dead pets and crashed cars to family traumas to misguided love affairs, Susannah Dickey’s revitalizing debut novel plunges us into the private world of one young woman as she navigates her rocky way to womanhood.
One of the most unique elements of this book is that it is written in the second person, meaning that the pronoun ‘you’ is used to address the reader. Dickey puts the reader into the position of the unnamed main character. Experiencing the narrative this way gave me a really visceral reaction., It was like recalling a memory, or the experience of an older family member telling you about something you did when you were small.
The story is told in vignettes labeled with the age of the main character and the month. For example, we begin at, “Three years old - May,” and end at, “Twenty-eight years old - May.” These vignettes are divided into three sections. Section one covers the character’s experiences as a child. Dickey captures the small but impactful moments of childhood - overhearing an argument or getting in trouble for some small action - that can hang around in our memory more vividly than the bigger and glossier events (and if you are me, these are the moments that pop up late at night when you can’t sleep). Dickey also writes about some of those big, glossy events from the lens of childhood, which adds texture to these moments.
Tennis Lessons could be classified as a coming of age story, but the main character’s pathway into adulthood is anything but linear, which is what I appreciate most about this character. From adolescence, she starts to understand herself as weird, like there is something the other girls know about social interactions that she doesn’t. As she transitions out of school, she feels like she is always a few steps behind, not measuring up to what she thinks she should be, not ready to take the path that she sees her peers on as they move away and begin university.
In Part 2, we see the first vignettes that are labeled in the present. This section is emotional and hard as our main character experiences some big events that will change the course of her life. Part 3 follows the main character to university which is described as, “where you study brings neither pride nor shame.’ Her time at university is also awkward and clunky, all written with close attention to detail, zooming in on cringe in a way that brings humor and richness.
Friendship is a strong theme throughout this story, which I love. The main character meets her friend Rachel in secondary school and we follow their relationship into adulthood. I always say that friendships are the greatest love in life, and our main character’s friendship with Rachel is written in a way that celebrates all the weird in-jokes and insults and love that comes with long-term friendships. We all see how relationships can shift with time and how people can change too.
This book is also a celebration of ordinariness. As young people, we dream up fantastic futures filled with success and glamour and romance, and I think adulthood is the process of unraveling all of that to realize that sometimes being an ordinary person with ordinary life is where we are happiest. It can feel like we are cheating ourselves to ‘settle’ for less than exotic world travel and endless parties and awards, but I know that for me, it was when I allowed myself to be happy with where I was that I started to feel like I was really living. This is echoed in the main character’s story and it is a really unique way to tell a ‘coming of age’. I think we all sometimes think that everyone is happy and loving life and we are the only ones who aren’t. In the book, realizing that we all have shit going on is really healing for our main character.
I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t go into much detail about some of the book’s bigger plot points, but if you have read it, connect with us on socials so dive in. When I posted about this book on my personal Instagram back in September 2020, I said that this story was refreshing because it was about being a late bloomer or needing more time to find a place in the world. As someone who has done a lot of life’s milestones out of their traditional order, it resonated.
I go into “coming of age stories” with a lot of skepticism, especially ones featuring white, middle-class characters who have largely supportive environments in which to fuck up. I think that story has been told to death. This character was rough around the edges, weird and shy but trying in ways that felt genuine and earnest. If you have ever felt like you were living in a different world than the people around you, who seemed to be doing and saying and being the right thing, then I think you would love this book.
PS: This book is not about tennis. Tennis is only mentioned once at the end of the book so if you are looking for a book about tennis this ain’t it.
Links to find out more about the book and the author:
https://www.johnhewittsociety.org/poetry_clips/susannah-dickey/
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-40017599.html