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Narrated by Sarah Gibbons
Eva CrockerUnabridged — 8 hours, 19 minutes
Narrated by Sarah Gibbons
Eva CrockerUnabridged — 8 hours, 19 minutes
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Like Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles's Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation.
A little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they're looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what's happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost.
Luckily, she has her friends. Smart and tough and almost terrifyingly open, Stacey and her circle are uncommonly free of biases and boundaries, but this incident reveals how they are still susceptible to society's traps. Navigating her way through friendship, love, and sex, Stacey strives to restore her self-confidence and to actualize the most authentic way to live her life - one that acknowledges both her power and her vulnerability, her joy and her fear.
All I Ask is a bold and bracing exploration of what it's like to be young in a time when everything and nothing seems possible. With a playwright's ear for dialogue and a wry, delicate confidence, Eva Crocker writes with a compassionate but unsentimental eye on human nature that perfectly captures the pitfalls of relying on the people you love.
Crocker pulls off an ending that brings the drama full circle in a way that is both unexpected and satisfying . . . Comparisons to Sally Rooney and Eileen Myles have been made, but there’s something in Crocker’s forthright descriptions of physical bodies and their functions that feels closer to the work of Ottessa Moshfegh . . . It is Crocker’s straightforward honesty and forthrightness that is most refreshing.
A wickedly funny, sexy, joyous novel, threaded through with sadness, uncertainty, and emotional risk.
There are novels that feel alive. There is no other way to describe it, because words like ‘fresh’ or ‘current’ are not enough. These novels are more than just a compelling plot or strong writing. They do more than tap into current events or debates. These novels offer access to something made animate on the page, and speak from a perspective that feels somehow deeply familiar and entirely unknown; Eva Crocker’s All I Ask is one such novel . . . Refreshing as it is tense and sensual as it is sad, All I Ask is a sharp and absorbing read.
Funny, hot, and heartfelt.
All I Ask is a carefully crafted, observant novel, whose dialogue and scene composition retain an intimacy and immediacy … [Eva Crocker] writes convincingly of the intersection of the personal and the political … A deft, assured debut.
This could be the breakout novel of the year.
Crackling, intense, and ultimately delightful … [All I Ask] is a wonderful character study and an encapsulation of a particular time and place. Plot and prose are rendered perfectly, and the ending will drive readers to scribble questions in the margins and create book clubs and discussion groups. Crocker is a writer we will be talking about for a long time.
| BN ID: | 2940175127646 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | House of Anansi Press Inc |
| Publication date: | 11/30/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
They took my computer and phone so they could copy the contents. They called it a mirror image. They said it was the fastest way to prove I wasn’t the suspect and also I didn’t have a choice.
There were nudes, there was a picture, taken with the flash, of a pimple on the back of my neck — swollen and inflamed. They didn’t know when they’d get to it. The unit was really backed up. What was it called? Child Pornography? Digital Something? “The Unit.” He said there were only three or four guys in the Unit. For the whole province.
There were emails back and forth with my mother, scheduling visits with my grandmother in the hospital. Emails where I said things like, I have kickboxing but I guess I can go in if no one else is available — lessons are prepaid. There were rejection emails from casting directors. All the stupid things I’d googled. Things I should have known. When did Newfoundland join Canada? What is Brexit? Are most oven dials Fahrenheit or Celsius? How much of that is in the mirror image? Reams of it.
These things take time. Couldn’t tell you. A judge in Gander had signed the warrant. What were they looking for? Illegal digital material. What does that mean? And what does “transmitted” mean? Transmitted from my address. Is it the same as seeded? It’s different than uploaded, I’ve seen “uploaded” in the paper. Footage of a slump-shouldered man with a windbreaker pulled over his head walking into the courtroom. A drawing in the newspaper of some sad-sack, evil piece of shit sitting beside the judge.
Who was combing through my hard drive? Picking through the digital traces, footsteps, shadows. Taking in all the un-deleted drafts, all the weird, unflattering angles. Three or four guys, taking their time.
When they came to my house, my hair was greasy and I wasn’t wearing a bra. I’d slept on my ponytail, it was sagging at the base of my neck, and I had glasses on. Normally I wear contacts; the glasses are an old prescription. I can’t read street signs with them. I’d slept in a big T-shirt and a pair of bicycle shorts — no bra. I woke up to the doorbell ringing and a pounding that shook the house. Both at the same time — the doorbell and the knocking. It woke me up. I put my glasses on and went to look out the window. The plastic frames were cold on the bridge of my nose, it made my sinuses tingle. Someone was pressing the doorbell in and holding it down. I pulled the curtain open with one hand and leaned out of view.
I assumed the knocking and the doorbell was someone wandered up from downtown. When you live downtown belligerent people wander up. They yell and piss in the street and sometimes they ring your doorbell again and again. You turn off the lights and wait for them to go away.
The month before, my roommate Holly and I had moved into a house at the end of a short street. Our living room windows were street level and looked onto a small parking lot on the side of a church. A nurses’ union and a row of group homes backed onto the lot, hiding it from the main road. The front of our house and the church enclosed the parking lot.
The top floor of the church had recently been turned into eleven bachelor apartments for low-income tenants. A clutch of people were always smoking near the church’s side entrance, facing the house, or else on the fire escape that extended from the church’s second floor. I left the curtains open and the living room lights brazenly bright in the evenings, even though you could see right in.
The church owned a dumpster that sat in the parking lot. Sometimes I’d slip into rubber boots and cross the parking lot with a garbage bag. I’d wear just my fleece bathrobe over a T-shirt and shorts when I ran out. The opening in the side of the dumpster screeched when I tugged on the handle. On cold days the side opening froze shut and I’d have to get on tiptoe and lift the dumpster’s lid with one arm to heft a bag of garbage in. The unlocked dumpster felt like a luxury, to be able to rid yourself of anything whenever you wanted.
There were two windows in my bedroom; one looked onto the parking lot in front of the house and one looked onto the back of the church. Behind the church there was a yard surrounded by a chain-link fence with sign that said “Outdoor Play Area.” There had been a daycare in the building long before we moved in. Now neighbourhood cats squirmed between the locked gates and used the Outdoor Play Area as a litter box. The shiny tape from inside a VHS was tangled in the branches of a tree just outside the fence. From my bedroom I could see the black ribbon moving in the wind, the plastic case knocking against the tree’s trunk.
Each time they pounded on the door, the crystal light-catcher I’d stuck to the window with a licked suction cup tapped the glass. I couldn’t see who was on the step so I had to lean into the window. Four cops. Only two could fit on the step, the other two were standing below them on the sidewalk. One had a shiny bald head. I thought there must be a fire next door. I was thinking that fire-drill word, “evacuate.” There must be a reason I need to evacuate. To be evacuated.
