conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Juliet, Naked about Annie, Duncan, England's with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Literary.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author returns to his roots - music and messy relationships - in this funny and touching new novel which thoughtfully and sympathetically looks at how lives can be wasted but how they are never beyond redemption. Annie lives in a dull town on England's bleak east coast and is in a relationship with Duncan which mirrors the place; Tucker was once a brilliant songwriter and performer, who's gone into seclusion in rural America - or at least that's what his fans think. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker's work, to the point of derangement, and when Annie dares to go public on her dislike of his latest album, there are quite unexpected, life-changing consequences for all three. the author uses this intriguing canvas to explore why it is we so often let the early promise of relationships, ambition and indeed life evaporate. And he comes to some surprisingly optimistic conclusions.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author returns to his roots - music and messy relationships - in this funny and touching new novel which thoughtfully and sympathetically looks at how lives can be wasted but how they are never beyond redemption. Annie lives in a dull town on England's bleak east coast and is in a relationship with Duncan which mirrors the place; Tucker was once a brilliant songwriter and performer, who's gone into seclusion in rural America - or at least that's what his fans think. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker's work, to the point of derangement, and when Annie dares to go public on her dislike of his latest album, there are quite unexpected, life-changing consequences for all three. the author uses this intriguing canvas to explore why it is we so often let the early promise of relationships, ambition and indeed life evaporate.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Juliet, Naked
  So Duncan stood in front of the middle of the three urinals, his hands placed convincingly in front of him, and smiled back over his shoulder at Annie.
  This time Duncan stood just inside one of the stalls, with the door open. The light was better there, for some reason. Annie took as good a picture of a man in a toilet as one could reasonably expect. When Duncan moved, she could see that this toilet, like just about every other one she'd ever seen in a rock club, was blocked.
  This was true. The guy behind the bar had initially suspected that they were looking for a place where they could shoot up, or perhaps have sex. Eventually, and hurtfully, the barman had clearly decided that they were capable of doing neither thing.
  Annie didn't regret the trip. She'd been to the U.S. a couple of times, to San Francisco and New York, but she liked the way Tucker was taking them to places she'd otherwise never have visited. Bozeman, for example, turned out to be a beautiful little mountain town, surrounded by exotic-sounding ranges she'd never heard of: the Big Belt, the Tobacco Root, the Spanish Peaks. After staring at the small and unremarkable house, they walked into town and sipped iced tea in the sunshine outside an organic café, while in the distance the odd Spanish Peak, or possibly the top of a Tobacco Root, threatened to puncture the cold blue sky. She'd had worse mornings than that on holidays that had promised much more. It was a sort of random, pin-sticking tour of America, as far as she was concerned. She got sick of hearing about Tucker, of course, and talking about him and listening to him and attempting to understand the reasons behind every creative and personal decision he'd ever made. But she got sick of hearing about him at home, too, and she'd rather get sick of him in Montana or Tennessee than in Gooleness, the small seaside town in England where she shared a house with Duncan.
  The one place that wasn't on the itinerary was Tyrone, Pennsylvania, where Tucker was believed to live, although, as with all orthodoxies, there were heretics: two or three of the Crowe community subscribed to the theory—interesting but preposterous, according to Duncan—that he'd been living in New Zealand since the early nineties. Tyrone hadn't even been mentioned as a possible destination when they'd been planning the trip, and Annie thought she knew why. A couple of years ago, one of the fans went out to Tyrone, hung around, eventually located what he understood to be Tucker Crowe's farm; he came back with a photograph of an alarmingly grizzled-looking man aiming a shotgun at him. Annie had seen the picture, many times, and she found it distressing. The man's face was disfigured by rage and fear, as if everything he'd worked for and believed in was in the process of being destroyed by a Canon Sure Shot. Duncan wasn't too concerned about the rape of Crowe's privacy: the fan, Neil Ritchie, had achieved a kind of Zapruder level of fame and respect among the faithful that Annie suspected Duncan rather envied. What had perturbed him was that Tucker Crowe had called Neil Ritchie a "fucking asshole." Duncan couldn't have borne that.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The fifteen years were gone, anyway. And what had gone with them? Children, almost certainly, and if she ever did take Duncan to court, that's what she would sue him for. But what else? What hadn't she done because she'd spent too much time with a boring, faithless nerd, apart from live the kind of life she'd wanted when she was twenty-five? She kept coming back to sex. It was reductive and unimaginative, she knew that, but it was also unarguable: Duncan had kept her from having sex with other people, and quite often with him. (They had never been the most highly sexed couple, but whoever kept score of these things would say he'd turned down her overtures more often than she'd turned down his.) How could she make up for fifteen years of missed opportunity, aged thirty-nine? And how much sex was that anyway? Suppose she'd met somebody she loved passionately fifteen years ago, and the relationship had endured? Then it would be fifteen years of sex with Other Man (OM) minus fifteen years of sex with Duncan. To include quality (Q) in the calculation would require a mathematical sophistication that was beyond her capabilities, even though it was probably necessary to give an accurate final figure.
  In other words: she wanted to see if anyone would want to have sex with her. Where to start, in Gooleness?
  She asked Ros, first of all, on the grounds that Ros was younger, and that younger people were closer to sex than she was.
  The Rose and Crown, halfway between the museum and the college, was their usual meeting place. It was an unexceptional downtown pub, usually half-full of shop assistants and office workers too intimidated to drink in some of the seaside bars, all of which seemed to employ DJs, even on Sunday at lunchtime. Annie wondered whether there was, anywhere in the country, a DJ wondering how to break into the business. It seemed unlikely, given the number of establishments that seemed to think they needed one. On the contrary, she suspected demand was such that young people had to be coerced into playing music in bars whether they wanted to or not, like a form of national service. Anyway, the Rose and Crown had a jukebox that offered Vince Hill's version of "Edelweiss," an offer that was only rarely taken up, in Annie's experience. It was hard to imagine many sex plans being drawn up in there. And if any were, they would be safe-sex plans, drawn up slowly, and running to several pages of warnings.
  Ros bought two half-pints of pale ale and they sat down at the back of the pub, away from a quiet group of fragrant-looking women who appeared as though they were trying to understand the root cause of a particularly bad day's profits at the Body Shop. Annie realized she was nervous, or excited, or something. Not because she seriously believed that there would be a plan, but because somebody was about to demonstrate interest in how she might spend part of the rest of her life—it had been a very long time since she had provided anyone with anything to talk about. She was somebody's project. She hadn't even been her own project for a while.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'Tucker didn't know whether he'd been listening to an elaborate ruse intended to obtain parental indulgence or a simply expressed but complicated idea about the relationship between time and narrative'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Tucker didn't know whether he'd been listening to an elaborate ruse intended to obtain parental indulgence or a simply expressed but complicated idea about the relationship between time and narrative. Jackson had put his finger on something, though. Not enough had happened, somehow. In the space of a few days, he'd had a heart attack, spoken to all of his children and two of his ex-wives, gone to a new town and slept with a new woman, spent some time with a man who had made him think differently about his work, and none of it had changed a thing. He had neither learned nor grown.
  He must have missed something. In the old days, he maybe could have squeezed a few songs out of this trip: there had to be a good lyric about a far-death experience, say. And Annie... he could have turned her into a pretty and redemptive girl from the north country who had helped him to feel, and heal. Maybe steal, and kneel, if he pushed it. She'd certainly cooked him a meal. And maybe without her he'd congeal. But if he couldn't write, what was he left with?
  The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning, and he'd managed to do that with just about everybody he'd ever met or married or fathered. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you. He'd somehow managed to retain the mental habits of a songwriter long after he'd stopped writing songs, and perhaps it was time to give them up.
  Malcolm looked hurt, and Annie felt sorry for him. She didn't need to be unkind. She was feeling rather fond of him, actually; her fifteen-minute splurge had justified her entire painful relationship with him. For months she'd been coming in here and telling him about Duncan's failure to buy milk when he'd been explicitly asked to do so, and they'd poked about in the ashes of her inner life in an effort to find some tiny spark of feeling. This morning she'd told him about recluses and heart attacks and failed marriages and one-night stands and duplicitous attempts to get pregnant, and she thought he might explode with the effort of trying to act as if he'd been expecting a story like this all along.
  Annie had always heard the town speaking through Malcolm, ever since her first session, but now she heard the voice of the country she had grown up in: she heard teachers and parents and teaching colleagues and friends. This was how England spoke, and she couldn't listen to her anymore.