An endearing combination of tender romance and witty comedy with an undercurrent of dark secrets, Emma Grey’s novel Pictures of You (Penguin Random House 2024) explores themes of coercive control, identity, memory, desire, friendship, trauma, betrayal, grief and redemption.
Evie Hudson wakes in a hospital room thinking she’s 16 and has a massive hangover after partying with her best friend, Bree. In reality, Evie is 29 and has just survived a car crash that killed her husband, Oliver. She has no memory of Oliver, or of anything that’s happened in the intervening 15 years. Everything has changed: her body, her looks, and as she realises gradually, her friendships, her relationships and even her tastes and ambitions. Oliver’s parents shepherd her through a funeral of great magnitude but she loses her nerve at the thought of being a widow to someone she doesn’t remember, with a life she could never have imagined, and she flees the scene with someone she believes is an Uber driver. Later she thinks he’s a photographer – part of the paparazzi camped outside the church, waiting to take shots of the famous, grieving Evelyn. But Drew Kennedy is much more to Evie than she knows or remembers. As she attempts to rebuild the puzzle of her life, can Drew allow himself to be drawn back into her orbit? And what will Evie do when she discovers her past is nothing like she thought it would be?
Grey travails heavy emotional territory through this story of grief and loss, not only with the death of Oliver, but also with the lingering illness of Drew’s mother, which is depicted in an authentic and moving way. She gives both these characters – Evie and Drew – a voice, with alternating chapters from the perspective of each. She also goes backwards and forwards in time, from the day after the accident, to 15 or 13 or seven years earlier, as Evie tries to untangle her life and sort the expectations from the reality from the memories, as they gradually begin to reassert themselves.
The first half of the book is an easy and familiar rom-com style that lulls the reader with appropriately cringeworthy references to over a decade ago, and a deliciously slowly building romance peppered with wit and humour. The pace steps up in the second half, with secrets, mysteries, twists and turns coming from all directions, and some definitely unexpected plot threads that are surprising and satisfying.
The interesting interrogation of photographs and the role they play in memory, and in recording the past, is a fascinating aspect, as is the exploration of the connection between our adolescent identities and the people we become as adults.
Death and serious illness are evoked with compassion and understanding, and it is clear that Grey brings much of herself into this part of the book, and that her experiences shape and inform her writing. The other, darker, aspect – of coercive control – is depicted with a subtle touch, such that (much as in real life) we don’t realise it’s happening until it’s happening.
Pictures of You is perfect if you enjoy family dramas, family secrets, the idea of a lost history, female friendships, the slow-burn of a building romance and the idea that we never really know people as well as we think we do.