Review: Dream Girl

The title of Joy Holley’s short story collection Dream Girl is wryly evocative. You’re invited to fill in the missing ‘Manic Pixie’ and you’d be right. Or perhaps you’re drawn to think of that mid-century Hollywood idealised girlfriend, more a perky figment of romantic sentimentality than a real person – and you’d be right.  Or you imagine a wispy, gossamer creature haunting your dreams, unreachable in waking hours, the cause of the shadows under your eyes. And you’d be right. The Dream Girls of Holley’s short story collection inhabit many spheres, messing with your emotions and sense of reality.

 And why not? These are girls realising their Lana Del Rey melancholy fantasies, embodying languid desires and beautiful sadnesses. The stories are witty, self-aware, honest and deeply engaging, capturing the tense longing and energy of this moment in life. Alice, the heroine of The Heart-Shaped Bed, opens a door onto her dream self when she impulsively buys the bed in question. Of course, her boyfriend can’t fit in it; doesn’t he know a metaphor when he sees one? 

In Cottagewhores, we see the Dream Girls as a self-aware ‘we’ rather than individuals: ‘We have a white stone fountain, with a nymph perched on the basin’s edge. We’re a two-minute walk from New World.’  It’s a curious thing to consider the manic pixie dream girl, so often represented in fiction as just the catalyst for a man’s emotional process, subjected to her own gaze, her own fascination, and coalescing in a self-sustaining community of friends and lovers.

Holley’s whimsical, amused style is bolstered by several historical stories that reveal a talent for research and a sharp ability to express detail without sacrificing atmosphere. Moral Delinquency in Children and Adults follows teen girls during the Milk Bar panics of the 1950s, with murder and pregnancy as equal horrors stalking the streets. School Spirit shows a convincing knowledge of Catholic boarding school life while maintaining the taut thrill of the ghost story. Girls in the Tunnel, in describing the whispered lore around a murdered girl, captures the fascination around dangers that are always lurking on the fringes of girlhood. 

Girls, it’s implied, are always in that tunnel: surrounded by risky darkness, hoping to walk through safely into a vaguely bright future. In the meantime, the girls keep the dead girl’s name alive, a warning and a talisman. These historical stories explore the contrasts between the moral panics of the past and the careless amorality of present-day relationships, while showing us that girls, and their yearnings and desires, are still the same. 

This is a book that not everyone will approach with equanimity. The internal life of these young women is perpetually fogged up with desire, confusion and intense feelings that are everything - until they fade with the love bites. This emotional fug can be a heady experience for anyone not currently living inside that process. It’s tempting to shrug it off: surely these ‘dream’ girls are silly, self-obsessed, wasting their time and lives on fluffy hedonism and self-consciously artificial drama, chasing ghosts, Instagram likes, casual sex, an aesthetic. Not a soul in these stories has a thought in their head beyond running across a moor in a white nightgown, seemingly unbothered by futures containing careers, qualifications, mortgages or even long-term relationships with the object of their crushes.

But what is youth for but to plunge deeply into its treacherous waters? This collection luxuriates in emotion, addicted to sensuality and fantasy. It’s an opium den for those whose drug is the swirling maelstrom of young womanhood’s ecstasy and melancholy.       

Reviewed by Ruth Spencer