'Everyone and Everything' by Nadine J. Cohen

 

From the BLURB: 

When Yael Silver’s world comes crashing down, she looks to the past for answers and finds solace in surprising places. An unconventional new friendship, a seaside safe space and an unsettling amount of dairy help her to heal, as she wrestles with her demons – and some truly terrible erotic literature. 

Funny and tender, Everyone and Everything is about friendship, grief and the deep, frustrating bond between sisters. It asks what makes us who we are and what leads us onto ledges. Perfect for fans of Meg Mason, Nora Ephron and Victoria Hannan, this is an intimate, wry and wise exploration of one woman’s journey to the brink and back.

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'Everyone and Everything' is the 2023 debut by Australian author, Nadine J. Cohen - from Pantera Press.

I've just come off an absolute roll with a certain type of new (millennial?) women's fiction. I've been calling it 'Fleabag'-esque. I don't like the term "well-dressed and distressed," for how some of the covers are often stylised - but I'd take "Women's Fiction with Bite." So I was in a bookshop the other day with a legit legend bookseller (Jaci from Hill of Content) who knows I have devoured 'Crushing' by Genevieve Novak, 'A Light in the Dark' by Allee Richards,' and 'Search History' by Amy Taylor ... when we were browsing the shelves and she just gently placed Nadine J. Cohen's debut into my hands and said; "Trust me," and reader - she was right. 

This is the story of Yael Silver who joined the 'orphan's club,' far too young, and when the book begins has just made an unsuccessful attempt to end her life because of her latent grief over the deaths of both her parents and Nanna, an f-boy who emotionally wrecked and ghosted her and a general feeling like she's become a burden to her older sister, Liora. 

Yael is on a long and slow pathway to recovery that largely begins in earnest when she starts regularly visiting the McIver's Ladies Baths in Coogee - perched on a cliff-face and offering her a scenic place to cry and read bad erotic fiction in peace. Until she meets older woman Shirley and they form an odd and healing friendship. 

At one point Liora asks Yael; 'Is that what it's like in your head all the time?' after she shares another random and disturbing thought, to which Yael replies; 'Yup.' And this is essentially the book, too. Chapters are broken down by months spanning a whole year, but they're made up of almost vignette fragments; wisps of memory and tangents (sometimes deeply emotional, recounting her childhood or the lead-up and come-down of her Nanna, mother and father's deaths - other times pop-culture heavy; "Pacey Witter cures all ills.") It's all cogent, I must stress, and brilliantly done for reading like a patchwork of a healing mind, and the memory-squares amounting to so much insight as to who Yael is as a person. She's deeply funny and relatable (from Cher Horowitz praise to 'Gilmore Girls' marathons, she reads like a friend) but also very broken and fragile, and I found myself both smiling and crying in equal measure. 

Jewish identity is also tenderly touched on in this book in a way that I really don't feel like I've read much in contemporary Australian fiction. Like how Yael looks back on her Nanna, mother and father's mental states at various times in their lives - how she retrospectively wonders what her grandparents being Holocaust survivors must have done to those lines of generational trauma;

I think about her often fraught relationship with mum, who, like all children of survivors, grew up with irrevocably damaged parents, and six million ghosts. 

... and musing on how comfortable Jewish people are with death, compared to gentiles. 

I absolutely adored this book. It wasn't easy, but it was beautifully wrought and Yael was a fine companion.

5/5