It’s weird how a first love can change everything. Some people smile when they remember their first relationship, while others try not to think about it at all. I tend to do the latter. So when publishing house Zwartjes & Labović gifted me Sophie Visser’s debut novel De eerste (The First), I read it straight away, hoping that I would finally be able to face my fears and write about my relationships. I postponed writing about it, however. Want to know why? Read on!
When it comes to love and relationships, I feel like I’m kind of a loser. I have hardly had any dates, have never done any internet dating, and have had less than a handful of relationships. When I did have a boyfriend, all of them managed to dump me around the May Break. Still, over seven years into my current relationship, whenever April comes around, I beg him not to dump me the next couple of months. Laura, in Sophie Visser’s De eerste is also struggling with relationships. Even though she is married and has two children, she keeps dreaming about Cristian, her first boyfriend. She starts writing down the entire history of that first relationship, hoping this will finally give her some peace.
Laura is the kind of girl who drops everything for her boyfriend. She changes her appearance, starts listening to different music, doesn’t bother talking to her friends anymore, and even has to repeat a year at school – that’s how overcome she is with love for her boyfriend. She feels much more at ease with him, in his house, than with her own family. The one thing that they struggle with, though, is having sex, while everyone else claims they started doing it ages ago. At times, it feels like her inability to have sex symbolises an immaturity she is unwilling to give up.
There are several reasons why Laura is not truly able to grow up. Part of her is completely dependent on her demanding an emotionally unstable mother. In her family, nobody ever really talks about anything, apart from when they find fault in each other. I kept wondering if Laura, who tells her story when she’s thirty-five years old, is still a teenager at heart. She’s delaying the moment to tell her deepest, darkest secret, as though denying this allows her to postpone accepting her adult responsibilities.
When it comes to postponing things, she’s not the only one. My life is nothing like Laura’s. All the things she mentioned about the city of Groningen, with her bars and clubs and her schools and their ongoing feuds, I recognise only because I started studying here. In fact, the school Laura eventually attends, I only know because I did my first internship there. I have never had any eating disorders, I did not have to repeat any years, and I never had a serious relationship at school. And yet there’s some part of me that identifies with Laura, but I postponed the moment I had to talk about it. That’s because it’s scary.
The thing in my life that resembles Laura’s, is strong memories about exes. It’s weird, but after reading De eerste, I kept thinking about that one relationship I had which never healed properly. It’s not the first, but The Third is not as good a title as The First. Like Laura, I started dreaming about him again, and when I imagined meeting him, I could not bear thinking about that. I told my boyfriend, who smiled and hugged me, and that’s when the dreams stopped. Apparently, this book evoked memories I had apparently pushed away, much like Laura had.
Laura’s feelings rise to the surface in such a severe way, that she’s no longer able to ignore them. In fact, she even decides to talk to Cristian again. They realise that they have both not fully recovered from their intense relationship; she still compares everyone to him, and he finds himself unable to truly trust anyone anymore. This conversation does bring Laura some peace, however, because she finds she understands herself much better now, allowing her to forgive herself for the mistakes she’s made.
Part of me is like Cristian, too; I struggle to trust people, too. Whether that’s because of that one relationship or because of other things that happened to me, I don’t quite know. What I do know (the observing reader will notice that the following remark steers safely away from any other personal details) is that my vision on literature turns out to be all too true: every book we read teaches us something about ourselves. It doesn’t matter if my life resembles Laura’s or not, because De eerste taught me that there’s still some parts of me that I haven’t fully embraced or accepted, and that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to take a closer look at those parts.
I’ll save that closer look for later, though. That’s because I’m not Laura. I’d rather read another thousand books and learn a thousand things about myself from them. As you can see, there’s a part of me that is reluctant to grow up, and that part really wants to postpone the difficult things. I might stop doing that, eventually. I might even write that novel called The Third, and then you’ll find out why part of me is still struggling with it
Until then, you’ll have to make do with blogs like this one, and hope that there will be more books like The First.
What did you think of De eerste? Have you had a similar first (or, like me, a later) love? Did you change yourself for your partner? Did you do things as a teenager that you later regretted, and were you ever able to forgive yourself for them? Have any books ever made you think about friendships or relationships that turned sour? Please let me know in the comments – if it’s not too scary for you, that is.
The Open Book 