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What You Could Have Won
by Rachel Genn - £10.00 And Other Stories (2020)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9781911508861 | ISBN 10: 1911508865
Fame is the only thing worth having. Love is temporary brain damage. Or so thinks Henry Sinclair, a failing psychiatrist, whose career-breaking discovery has been pinched by a supervisor smelling of nipple grease and hot-dog brine.
An emotional miser and manipulator par excellence, desperate for the recognition he's certain his genius deserves, Henry claws his way into the limelight by transforming his girlfriend--a singer-in-ascendance, beloved for her cathartically raw performances--into a drug experiment. As he systematically works to reinforce feelings of worthlessness while at the same time feeding off Astrid's fame, and as Astrid collapses deeper into dependence, what emerges is a two-sided toxic relationship: the bullying instincts of a man shrunk by an industry where bullying is currency, and the peculiar strength of a star more comfortable offloading her talent than owning her brilliance.
Pinging between their apartment in New York (where they watch endless episodes of The Sopranos), a nudist campsite in Greece (where the tantalizingly handsome Gigi thwacks octopi into the sand), and a celebrity rehab facility in Paris (founded by the cassock-wearing and sex-scandal plagued 'artist' Hypno Ray), What You Could Have Won is a relationship born of regrettable events, and a novel about female resilience in the face of social control.
(Price & availability last checked: March 2021)
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