A Review of What It’s Like In Words by Eliza Moss

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of What It’s Like In Words.

This title will be released on December 3, 2024 by Henry Holt & Co.

I finished Eliza Moss’s debut novel, What It’s Like in Words, on the same day I realized I needed to break up with my situationship. They were sweet, sexy, and spoiled me rotten, and I had to fight against every dysfunctional people-pleasing instinct in my body to even identify I wanted to leave them. But being afraid to leave–or of being left–is not the same thing as wanting to stick around. 

This is familiar emotional territory for the novel’s main character, Enola, on both sides of the equation. What It’s Like in Words explores the murky waters of love, self-doubt, manipulation, and abuse as Enola struggles to finish her novel while navigating her anonymous boyfriend’s turbulent temper. A couple’s trip to Kenya begins to unravel Enola’s long-held narratives about her own life as childhood memories resurface, making it more difficult than ever to maintain the fragile illusion of being the Cool Girl. Enola is forced to confront what happened to her father many years ago, finally facing all she has inherited from her past and gaining the strength to carve a new path. 

What It’s Like in Words fills the void left when Phoebe Waller Bridge said “no” to Fleabag Season 3–Enola is unlucky in love, low on self-worth, and full of feminist guilt. She works at a cafe in London, formerly with her best friend named Ruth–or “Roo” to Fleabag’s “Boo.” The similarities are no accident–Moss lists Fleabag as the first comptitle in the book description. 

Where Fleabag toys with the fourth wall by addressing the camera directly, Moss employs a similar method of unreliable narration, occasionally pulling back and rewriting details of the scene as if Enola had remembered them wrong. As Enola represses and curates pieces of herself, her memories are subject to alteration. The “real” scenes are often less picturesque than Enola’s first attempt at relaying the memory. The novel employs a braided narrative, switching between the past and the present day, and many scenes feel intentionally distanced; quotation marks are omitted, giving conversations a glaze of ambiguity, open to reader interpretation. These Fleabaggian nods to the audience give Moss the opportunity to play with the unreliable narrator, but they disappear for most of the middle of the book and rarely go all the way–except for a shocking split timeline near the end of the novel. 

While they share a sort of British familial frigidness, what sets this novel apart from Fleabag is its unsparing portrayal of emotional abuse. The efficiency with which the boyfriend twists innocent comments, volleys justified criticisms, and escalates minor inconveniences left me feeling as vulnerable to his manipulations as Enola. His narcissism is unpleasantly visceral, from his constant negging to his spite at the success of other writers, and I found myself wanting to argue with this fictional man. In that sense, the novel succeeded by subjecting readers to the emotional erosion of gaslighting. Enola’s self-doubt, amplified by the novel’s ambiguous style of narration, leave a vacuum of certainty that this master manipulator is more than eager to fill. 

While Enola is a relatable and sympathetic narrator, there is nothing good about her anonymous boyfriend to justify her frenzied love for him. From his introduction, he is spewing insults, negging Enola, and dropping red flags like breadcrumbs. Aside from Enola telling readers he is sexy and funny, there’s not much evidence to endear readers to him or lend credibility to her obsession with him. He starts out pretty darn awful and only gets worse. In a culture rife with victim-blaming, it’s hard to write about the senselessness of emotional abuse without making the victim seem senseless herself, for still going home with the guy holding the bright red “Abuser” sign–not to mention, all of her best friend’s unheeded warnings. The first inklings of his abusive nature could have been woven into the story with more subtlety, so that readers initially resonate with Enola’s love for him.

The anonymous boyfriend overshadows Enola’s second partner in the novel, a lawyer named Virinder–the “nice guy” to his “bad boy.” While Virinder is sweet, doting, and capable of making Enola orgasm, there’s nuance to his style of entitlement and manipulation. Moss takes her time to render both men as flawed, nuanced characters rather than archetypes. However, the “bad boy” gets disproportionately more attention, and Virinder’s storyline feels slightly truncated by the novel’s multiple timelines.

Interestingly, What It’s Like in Words takes place against the backdrop of the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, despite being a story that revolves around Londoners. Echoes of Trump’s campaign and various misogynistic scandals are peppered throughout the book while Enola contorts herself to appease mediocre men. Sexism, of all the -isms, is most lethal inside the privacy of an intimate partnership, but the reverberations of state-sanctioned misogyny ring clear across the Atlantic Ocean. The women of this novel feel the threat of misogyny, but they feel the weight of their own reactions in the face of misogyny even more. 

Enola hates both men in What It’s Like in Words yet returns to them when they dangle the carrot of emotional security over her head. She takes stuttering steps towards independence, but it’s not until she fully understands she must choose her own peace that she can leave both of them. The same people-pleasing tendencies keep her trapped with the “nice guy” just as much as with the abuser. It takes courage to realize someone being “the better option” doesn’t mean they are the one. Enola discovers the power in rewriting the narrative of her own life, of evolving from a passive character to an agent in relationships who can revoke consent when she wants to. What It’s Like in Words is the story of the self–the whole self, the uncurated self–overpowering the fear of being left behind.