A Twisted Fairytale: On Amy Bonnaffons's "The Regrets"

Amy Bonnaffons | The Regrets | Little, Brown | February 2020 | 296 pages

We're all familiar with the Hallmark metaphors—I'm nothing without you, you complete me, you're my world—but what happens when these fairytale tropes become physical facts? In Amy Bonnaffons's dark, sexy and mysterious first novel, The Regrets, one woman's daydream becomes a nightmare when she finds herself inexplicably drawn to a witty bad boy who turns out to be dead.

In a dingy office, an unnamed "Officer" informs Thomas that he is insufficiently dead. Due to a bureaucratic snafu involving an angel, Thomas lacked an "exit narrative" and now must stay on Earth for ninety days to pass successfully into the afterlife. In this unique form of purgatory, which evokes The Good Place, Thomas is stuck in an effervescent, flickering body. He is forbidden from consuming substances or becoming intimate with the living, lest he incur "regrets."

But of course, in typical romantic fairytale fashion, Thomas cannot keep himself away from Rachel, a quiet, introspective, and independent New York librarian who her friends describe as "a princess in a glass case." Golden-haired Thomas risks it all—transgressing the world's natural order and jeopardizing a peaceful afterlife—to become one with Rachel. In his defense, Thomas wonders, "is there a form of love that's not a welcome unraveling?" 

During these coronavirus times, reading a book about a woman who maroons herself in her apartment for weeks on end with her ghost boyfriend made me think about the boundaries within a relationship, the way we present ourselves publicly and privately, and the easiness, especially now, of falling into a codependent relationship. "Letting yourself free fall like that," said the best friend of Rachel. "It's the best feeling in the world. I want you to have it."

Through the use of the surreal, Bonnaffons offers stunning insight into the nature of intimacy, love, infatuation, desire, interpersonal relationships, and the uncanny connections between sex and death. "To be alive even partially, I suppose, is to be betrayed again and again by your body—by its recklessness, its commitment to pleasure," she writes. "Life, no matter how raw and fragile and doomed, will do what life does: reach out toward other life."

Following in the style of her 2018 short story collection, The Wrong Heaven, Bonnaffons uses poetically precise language to bring words to seemingly indescribable sentiments. "The girl with the red lipstick, or the idea of the girl, was a bright vivid gash through my loneliness," Thomas said of Rachel. "A loneliness I can only describe as both infinite and suffocating, like a loop of musty bandage, layer upon layer of it, tightening as it thickens, deadening as it pains."

Another enchanting aspect of Bonnaffons's style is her humor. She offers sharp and lively observations about gender and millennial culture, reminiscent of stand-up comedian Iliza Shlesinger. "When you feel a man's eyes on you, you uncross your legs and then recross them the other way," says Rachel from The Regrets. "It is a simple trick but what it silently communicates is your sexual restlessness: it indicates the presence of an energy emanating from your general crotch area, which you can barely contain."

I attended a reading of the story "Horse" from The Wrong Heaven in 2018 and was mesmerized by the bizarre relatability of the main character—a woman who was taking tranquilizers to become a horse: "Maybe you have longed to strip away the grammar of patriarchy and reinvent everything from the bottom up." Like The Regrets, The Wrong Heaven exemplifies the notion that sometimes, the surreal is the most effective way to grapple with the sticky, tangled emotions of reality.

Since 2018, I have frequently returned to The Wrong Heaven, and the stories always shine with fresh insight, so I was thrilled when Bonnaffons was able to join my reading group's August discussion of The Regrets. During our conversation, I confirmed my supposition that The Regrets is an expansion of her earlier short story, "Black Stones," which involves a sexualized angel feeding smooth, silty black stones to a terminal hospital patient. Bonnaffons said that she wrote "Black Stones" during her MFA program and had always wanted to create a more expansive cosmology out of its world. At one point, Bonnaffons even wrote a book draft that was double the length of The Regrets and which included comprehensive world-building details about the nature of the afterlife. Ultimately, Bonnaffons decided that the longer version took away from the central relationship between Thomas and Rachel.

The darkness underpinning the relationship between Thomas and Rachel is not entirely their own—it spreads, rippling through the life of Mark, Rachel's ex-boyfriend. The book's form, six sections written in Thomas, Rachel, and Mark's first-person perspectives, highlights this theme: that love requires three. "The two primarily involved and the third, who serves as an obstacle, an inducement, a reason for the two to come together in the first place—and, once they do, as an invisible audience," Bonnaffons writes. "Every individual love story takes place within a larger fabric of desire, stretching out infinitely, pulled from every possible direction." Upon rereading the book, however, I thought that this theme could have been fleshed out more: how are the other "thirds," such as Thomas's old best friend and Mark's lover, affected by the ghostly relationship?

Some readers, such as my friends in the reading group, wished to read the lengthened version of The Regrets. Although I understand the appeal of peeking behind the curtains, I am satisfied with where The Regrets left me—somehow feeling empty and full, confused and clear. As Thomas the ghost said, "nothing is sexier, after all, than a mystery."