Rachel Harrison’s So Thirsty focuses on a young woman called Sloane, who has let things happen to her for a really long time. Her 36th birthday is around the corner, and her husband has surprised her with a weekend away (not with him, because he’s a serial cheater and Sloane knows that he probably just wants her out of his way), but with her childhood best friend Naomi. Naomi’s life is a “wild, glamorous adventure,” and she is everything Sloane is not—unpredictable, fun, free. Sloane on the other hand, has given in to the mundanities of suburban life and acquiesced to a number of things she’s unhappy about, including her husband’s infidelities. But perhaps a weekend away with her best friend is what Sloane needs to continue feeling distracted, and to just break away from the discomfort of being herself, a discomfort so strong that her “skin feels like a straitjacket.”
Though Sloane is expecting a quiet weekend of massages and catching up, Naomi wants more, and insists they head out into the small town, where she chats up a random intriguing man in a bar. The next night Sloane finds herself being dragged along to a random party at the house of the same random intriguing man—and it is a strange party. What starts off as Eyes Wide Shut vibes soon turns into True Blood vibes, as it becomes clear that the party’s other guests are a nest of vampires, and instead of just the casual sex Naomi had tried to encourage Sloane to participate in, things take a bloody, violent turn. The next morning, the two women wake up to find themselves extremely thirsty, for a very specific drink, and Sloane’s identity crisis takes on a very new twist. Naomi, in all her impulsiveness, is quick to give in to her baby-vamp needs, but Sloane, true to her human nature, is guilty and struggles against the needs of her new body, mind and life. The nest of vampires who changed their lives offer to absorb the women into their family, with Sloane finding herself attracted to broody, handsome, almost cliché- like Henry, who tries his best to offer her a new perspective on the life she may be able to now lead, once she accepts that she will eventually need to slake her thirst, regularly and without remorse.
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So Thirsty
But Sloane is unaccustomed to expressing or satisfying her needs, whether they be visceral or emotional, though she starts to realise that a lot of what bothered her is no longer a concern, whether it be aging or basic earthly principles. “I understand in this moment that there is no right thing to do,” she thinks, “no good way to exist as what we are, or even as what we were—mortal women. My worldview, my rules, my morality were all constructed as a cage for my shame, shame forged by forces outside of myself. I’ve related restriction to virtue, nourishment to gluttony; associated satisfaction with guilt ever since I learned about the Atkins diet, ever since I heard the word ‘slut’, ever since I was young.” Sloane has to learn how to settle into this new skin, how to create a life she can enjoy leading, not one that leads her. In the dynamic between her constant quest for control and Naomi’s erratic, explosive behaviour, we witness the push and pull between two women who are bound to each other eternally, and that’s not just a hyperbolic description of their friendship.
So Thirsty is very much about sisterhood. Sloane and Naomi are ego and id. They are each other’s perfect foils, bickering and even straight up fighting, but under it all lies an immensely deep love. To an outsider it can sound like they hate each other:
[…] but this is a form of unconditional love. Of release. We gift each other the freedom to gnash our teeth, to growl and gnaw. Behave badly. Be terrible. Because we’ll love each other through it and no one else will. Because this ugliness is not permitted anywhere else. At least, not without consequence.
This growling and gnawing become real, the ugliness turns physical, and the consequences become almost too much for their relationship to bear. But no matter what, Sloane is clear that Naomi is more than her best friend—she is her youth: “‘”the purest, truest version of myself, before life got in the way. Before I knew about things like property taxes and deductibles and inflation, about the slow drain of ordinary days and the quick disappearance of ordinary years… She holds the best of me, and I think I hold the best of her.” It is in this knowledge that the two women have to find a new balance, a new dynamic to see them through this abrupt life change.
Harrison has written yet another fast paced and highly contemporary thriller. So Thirsty is smart and funny, and it is fun—something that we often don’t get often enough in novels about women’s relationships with each other and their environment. This isn’t a coming of age story in the traditional way, but it is one nonetheless. The vampire novel can be a metaphor for so much, and Harrison takes it to new places by making it about a woman afraid of aging, and more specially, aging alone in a muted life of compromise. “Sometimes wisdom sounds like a threat,” learns Sloane, who must learn to stop holding back, because “just because you have all the time in the world doesn’t mean you cant still waste it.”
So Thirsty is published by Berkley.
