The Point of It All

This is is a queer love story framed as an act of literary correction. It opens with an interview transcript about a newly published book that claims to reveal the true story behind Ellis Williams, a famous musician, his legendary album Over and Over, and the woman everyone believed inspired it: Holland Smith. The interviewer asks whether the book is revenge. The answer is no: it is about setting the record straight. The public thought it knew one love story, but the manuscript argues that the real one was between Holland and Roslyn Beck.

The main story begins in 1996, when Ros Beck is sixteen and at an end-of-GCSE party in North London. Ros is awkward, closeted, anxious in her body, and grieving a family loss she rarely speaks about: her younger sister Connie died when Ros was nine, and Connie’s bedroom remains preserved at home like a shrine. At the party Ros has a charged encounter with Amanda, a girl from football. They walk home together, kiss in a playground, and Ros feels both exhilarated and ashamed. Amanda pulls away, and Ros panics.

At the bus stop, crying, Ros meets Holland Smith, the pink-haired American girl she had earlier noticed on the stairs. Holland has also been crying because Bradley Fuller, a boy, has humiliated her. Holland is wild, funny, direct and worldly in a way Ros finds irresistible. When Ros admits she kissed a girl and thinks she scared her, Holland refuses to treat it as shameful. Her response is one of the emotional keys of the book: “you’re not someone’s dirty little secret.” Holland invites Ros onto the bus, then back to her house in Crouch End. They drink wine, smoke weed, talk in Holland’s bedroom, and Ros comes out properly for the first time. She tells Holland, “I want you to know me.” Holland answers that she wants Ros to know her too.