A Real Piece of Work

“Mum has always said that the sea is in my bones, that it doesn’t matter that I moved away.” This sentence – which appears near the beginning of Freya Bromley’s debut novel, A Real Piece of Work – captures the essence of the story right from the offset. Bromley’s tale revolves around Nola who, following the death of her beloved older sister, Darina, has written a memoir on the relationship between the two, a work which has turned into an unexpected hit. Critics love it, readers love her, there’s talk of film rights. But when her publisher gets an anonymous complaint about the book, she instantly suspects her family. And when they reunite for a trip to the coast where they grew up, in honour of Darina’s anniversary, she’s determined to find out who it was.

A Real Piece of Work follows on from Bromley’s memoir The Tidal Year, a work which similarly explores the loss of a sibling. Both books are steeped in grief, and the complexities of processing the unexpected death of somebody who was meant to grow alongside you. They also share another theme: swimming. The Tidal Year is centered around the death of Bromley’s brother, and her own journey swimming all the tidal pools around the UK in a response to that trauma. While A Real Piece of Work is fictional, Bromley’s relationship with the water, and with wild swimming, remains intrinsic to her writing.

The novel begins by interrogating Nola’s own relationship to loss, in the first person, and we soon get a view of the wider family through her eyes. There’s her father, an object of suspicion, affair ridden but ‘untouchable’. He stands alongside her mother, whom Bromley devastatingly describes as ‘reaching’: “Reaching for a better job, better house, better status. It also seemed to me that Mum was always reaching for Dad. She never quite grasps him.” While Nola’s older sister Darina has died, her other siblings are fleshed out. There’s the “emotional-support eldest daughter”, Jen, who, as Nola recounts, is “the kind of person you might describe as ‘put together’’’; and the younger twins: Cillian, “born contrarian”, and Connor, the gentlest of the group.

Each member has their own relationship to both Darina’s death and Nola’s writing, and the latter’s determination to find out which member of her family has ‘betrayed’ her adds a layer of intricacy to her – and therefore our – perception of each. As the family set off together to Lundy Island, to mark Darina’s anniversary, it’s evident that they are further away from each other than ever, despite their rare physical proximity. The scattering of Darina’s ashes serves as a focal point of the trip, and it’s here that the family tensions, which have been brewing throughout, finally break the surface. The result is an extraordinarily cinematic, raw scene, which ends with Nola’s mother asking, in defeat, “Why is being in this family so lonely?”

Nola’s relationship to her family isn’t the only complexity of the novel; we also have to consider Mac, her boyfriend, who is present for a large part of the book. From the offset he is depicted as almost vital to Nola’s survival, with her need for both him and the water clear through Bromley’s descriptions: ‘He has this lighthouse smile’. Their relationship, fittingly, is for mostly a beacon of light—having met in the ultimate meet-cute of chaining their bikes together in a Sainsbury’s car park, they’ve remained bound together ever since. Still, as readers we are firmly in Nola’s head, and alongside the giddiness that comes with falling in love, there’s also uncertainty and fear. Will Mac want to stay with her? What will their relationship become? There’s an intimacy to choosing to stay in love, Bromley observes, but there’s also a risk; and this sense of lingering anxiety is something that she delves into well.

Despite Nola’s complex relationships with the living, it’s the ghost of Darina who shines through the strongest. We first learn about her not through the sisters’ similarities, but through their contrasts. Nola’s London is defined by the pubs of East Dulwich and the London Review Bookshop; Darina’s is centred on the “bottle shops and bars on Chatsworth Road, the marshes and ecstatic dance in Hackney.” Darina is a ‘supernova’, Nola ‘bookish’. Despite this, like the twins, the two of them are paired, by each other and by the rest of the family. This closeness is offset, however, by guilt. We know that the two had a fight before Darina’s death, but it’s only as the story unfurls – flitting between the past and present, between Nola’s perspective and excerpts from her memoir, Animal Oracle – that we learn exactly what happened.

As in The Tidal Year, Bromley writes on grief with a rare deftness and subtlety. In one of the most touching admissions of the novel, Nola narrates: “I felt different from the woman she knew and guilty about that. She was slipping away from me, but I knew I was the one moving.” It’s a very true depiction of mourning, one that shines a light on the feeling of losing somebody again and again through the grieving process. That said, the book is not without levity. The writing is sharply funny, and captures another element of bereavement perfectly: how, at times, it can feel completely ridiculous. For instance, while filling Mac in on her family dynamics, Nola makes a list that includes “Darina - 2 years older (dead)”. “Darina brackets dead” immediately becomes a recurring joke between the two. It’s the kind of flippancy that translates well to real life grief, and Bromley’s refusal to shy away from it makes her work all the more powerful.

In each of Bromley’s books, the open water acts as a liminal space, in which her and her characters are able, to an extent, to remove themselves from the world whilst submerged. In The Tidal Year, the real-life Bromley screams underwater, using tidal pools as a place to let go totally, later admitting: “I started swimming after my brother died… I’m scared to think or feel sad about him, so I keep busy and it’s exhausting. When I’m swimming, I can’t think of anything else. The cold takes over. My mind is clear. It’s the only break I get.” While A Real Piece of Work is fictional, the theme remains. When Nola is at her lowest around her family, she swims: “Swimming would help. It always did. The sea had a way of washing things clean, even if only temporarily.” The sea acts as a kind of exorcising force in the novel, with salt burning Nola’s throat, the water gripping her lungs. It’s overwhelming and overpowering, and in Bromley’s hands it doesn’t totally wipe grief clean, but renews it, allowing her characters some room to breathe.

Swimming gives Nola clarity as well, reducing previously complex emotions to their bare bones. Whilst underwater, diving to retrieve Darina’s ashes, fallen overboard in a scene bordering on the hysterical, she sees her mother above her: “The outline of Mum’s body was tall above me, swaying, and releasing a melody as close to a grief cry as our family had ever heard.” Elsewhere in the novel, our narrator is far less sympathetic to her mother’s anguish, commenting that there is a “constant request for someone to soothe her”, but this viewing of her mother at her most primal, from the sea, is something which alters the course of their relationship—or seems to, at least.

The connection between swimming and the processing of trauma has become a common theme in recent books. In the past few years, there have been more writings than ever unpacking the same topic, including Jade Song’s Chlorine and a reissue of Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, two works which frame the water as a place of transformation and rebirth, enabling those in it to come to terms with their true feelings and selves. In the former, a high school competitive swimmer uses it to grapple with questions of gender identity and sexuality, with her local pool, and later a rural creek far from her home, the only places in which she’s able to fully realise herself. Swimming Studies, on the other hand, is a memoir which interrogates what the act of swimming really means. In her youth, Shapton was a national competitive swimmer, who made it as far as the 1988 and 1992 Canadian Olympic trials, and her writing looks back at her career. One of the most powerful points of the work is her relearning how to be in the water, not competitively but for pleasure - there’s a distinction between swimming and bathing for her, and this separation allows her a new type of creative release.

It doesn’t feel coincidental that the majority of these books have been written by women. At a time where women’s bodies are constantly scrutinized and policed, turning back to the natural world, and specifically to the water, can act as a refuge. Recent years have seen a resurgence of ancient rituals, with over 20,000 visiting Stonehenge this year to mark the summer solstice, yet swimming, whether it be in pools or the open sea, feels particularly relevant. It’s an environment which is naturally overwhelming, but in willing submersion there’s simultaneously a weightlessness and control which quiets the noise of society and becomes a sanctuary, reflected in the writings of each Bromley, Song, and Shapman.

In A Real Piece of Work, Bromley compares the siblings’ relationships with each other, and with Darina, to the way in which the tide shapes the shoreline, always ebbing, always flowing. It’s a moving image, and one which evokes the act of reimagining and remembering somebody over the years through storytelling. A spiky, wonderful piece of writing, we are left with not an individual feeling, but a portrait of a family, all grieving in different ways.