"Let's Never Speak of This Again" Book Review

“Later, Mum knocks, pokes her head around my door and asks how I’m going. I want her to come in, lie down next to me and stroke my hair like she did when I was little…”

Let’s Never Speak of This Again (herein referred to as LNSOTA) is unapologetically adolescent. With its distinct authenticity to the throes of girlhood, and the tumultuous time of being a teenager, Megan Williams weaves together a story that explores friendship, grief, sexuality, family, and growing-up into a heartbreaking and heartwarming story. LNSOTA is an homage to teenagedom in suburban Australia (specifically, Brisbane) and is suffused with Australianisms and Brisbanisms that give the story its unmistakable charm. From the dynamics of boys schools versus girls schools (ew, gender, but also all too real in Brisbane), the warring factions of interschool netball comps, the bus routes to and from school, and piling on the couch to watch The Bachelor, Williams painted a perfect picture of my beloved hometown. 

The story follows our protagonist, grade tenner Abby, and centres around her family and close knit circle of girlfriends. Through first-person narrative voice, we come to know Abby intimately, living through her monologues of self-doubt (in literally everything), clumsy social interactions (see: Chloe), poor decision making (kissing her cousin), and personal hardships (I’ll let you read the book). Abby’s teen angst is palpable from the moment we meet her, and her dry witticism is cutting and relatable throughout the entire story from fights with her parents and sibling, to beefing with her friends. And then a hot new bombshell enters the villa, Chloe, who swoops in to steal Abby’s best friend and upend everything she knows and loves. All that for tragedy to then strike, and grief follow quickly behind. Bad things come in threes right? So what could possibly come next?

Williams authentically captures complex emotions, depicting the ups and downs of grief, the ebbs and flows of relationships (both familial and social), and respects the nuance that grief is never clear cut. Williams nails Abby’s sadness and angst and it was hard to not feel that very same hurt as I spent more and more time with her. I understood her angst, I felt her grief. It was unpleasant and uncomfortable - because grief is never either - in such a skillful and honouring way of describing such an awful feeling. 

As I was reading, I was almost involuntarily thrust back into my own memories of high school in a nostalgic, cringy, melancholic, and almost contented kind of way. Lots of feelings right? Exactly. Teenagerhood is all of those things and it is so easy to forget that as an adult, and even easier still to dismiss those feelings due to the young age in which you felt them. But at the time, those feelings were the biggest most all consuming feelings you could possibly imagine. The penultimate decision-making of choosing your senior school subjects? Been there Having a crush on your best friends brother? Been. There. That feeling of all-consuming guilt for something that’s not even your fault? BEEN. THERE. LNSOTA has it all, in a truly almost terrifying way (how and why must it be so accurate?!), that is so entirely authentic and true that it makes the story one big nostalgia trip. With its magical way of putting me right back in the shoes of my teenage self, I am sure teenagers reading it now can relate and see themselves written on the page just as well as I can. 

Let’s Never Speak of This Again, is one not just for young adults, but for all adults. The warm nostalgia, the melancholia, the authentic awkwardness, and the bittersweet taste of growing up, are all too familiar feelings bundled up into a digestible, easy to read, and beautiful story. Praise to Megan Williams and her debut onto the YA scene, Let’s Never Speak of This Again was a beautiful first entry to her body of work and I cannot wait to see what she does next!

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Megan Williams, author of Let's Never Speak of This Again, will be at Love YA Day on June 1st in conversation with Biffy James (Completely Normal (and Other Lies)) in a session moderated by Jane Sullivan.