Story for the Week
When it’s bad, television dialog makes us roll our eyes, comment on how ridiculous it is, and sometimes even change the channel because we just can’t take it any longer. Good dialog moves the story along and keeps us watching. Great dialog? Great dialog weaves itself into our language and pop culture and makes an impact for years to come.
Don’t believe me? Have you ever heard of a “pick-me girl”? (You Grey’s Anatomy fans know where I’m going with this. 😉)
Online dictionaries and websites define the term as a girl or woman who acts to secure male validation or acceptance. When you hear the term today, it’s with negative connotations. She’s desperate for his attention. She’s only acting that way because she thinks he likes it. She doesn’t even like football! “What a pick me” is the common reaction.
I saw a video conversation with Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl, who respectively played Meredith Grey and Izzie Stevens on Grey’s Anatomy. Pompeo was relaying a story about her daughter talking with her friends, and they described someone by saying, “She’s such a pick-me girl.” The irony was that Meredith Grey is viewed as the original pick-me girl. And Pompeo didn’t even like the speech that started it all because she felt that it was too desperate. Pompeo’s daughter was confused by it too and asked Pompeo why her character was begging a man to love her.
In the pilot episode of Grey’s, we meet Meredith and Derek Shepherd, played by Patrick Dempsey, in the morning after they meet at a bar. Their budding love story plays out all through season one until the final episode when Derek’s estranged wife Addison (Kate Walsh) shows up. Turns out, Addison had cheated, Derek left, and he fell in love with Meredith.
In season two, Derek decides that he owes it to Addison to try to repair their marriage, but he and Meredith are still drawn to one another episode after episode. In episode 10, Meredith gives Derek what has become an iconic speech:
“Okay here it is. Your choice, it’s simple: Her or me. And I’m sure she’s really great. But Derek, I love you. In a really, really big, pretend to like your taste in music, let you eat the last piece of cheesecake, hold a radio over my head outside your window unfortunate way that makes me hate you, love you. So pick me. Choose me. Love me.”
He didn’t choose Meredith…until season three, episode seven.
But Derek and Meredith’s isn’t the only iconic love story for Meredith. If you are a fan of the Bachelor franchise (and probably even if you aren’t), you have probably heard people describe their partner as their “person” with all these romantic connotations of soulmates and being “the one.”
“You’re my person” also started with Grey’s, but it was the platonic love between Meredith and Christina (Sandra Oh). The two characters started as interns together, highly competitive but forever bonded in friendship. When Christina needs to list an emergency contact person on a medical form, she lists Meredith and then informs her later. Meredith isn’t surprised at all when Christina tells her “You’re my person.” It becomes a recurring theme between them.
Their friendship is one of the most solid relationships on the show. When Christina explains the meaning to her then-fiancé, she says, “If I murdered someone, she’s the person I’d call to help drag the corpse across the living room floor. She’s my person.” When Derek can’t get Meredith to stop crying after she sits through an execution, he takes her to Christina’s. And when Christina’s character leaves the show in season 10, she tells Meredith “Don’t be a hero. You’re my person. I need you alive. You make me brave.”
We should all have a person. I never called my late husband my person. He was the love of my life, yes. My person? No. He did used to be my emergency contact person. That personhood now resides with my brother-in-law. My drag-a-corpse-across-the-living-room-floor person? That would be my best friend, Stephanie. She knows where the bodies are buried…metaphorically speaking. 😉
In the book reviewed below, Luna’s person is Bea…but in a really creepy kind of way. 😬
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐½
3.5 Stars for There Should Have Been Eight by Nalini Singh
416 pages
Publisher: Berkley
Publication Date: November 21, 2023
The Creepy Book Club selection for January 2024, purchased on Amazon.
Publisher’s Description
Seven friends.
One last weekend.
A mansion half in ruins.
No room for lies.
Someone is going to confess.
Because there should have been eight….
They met when they were teenagers. Now they’re adults, and time has been kind to some and unkind to others—none more so than to Bea, the one they lost nine long years ago.
They’ve gathered to reminisce at Bea’s family’s estate, a once-glorious mansion straight out of a gothic novel. Best friends, old flames, secret enemies, and new lovers are all under one roof. But when the weather turns and they’re snowed in at the edge of eternity, there’s nowhere left to hide from their shared history.
As the walls close in, the pretense of normality gives way to long-buried grief, bitterness, and rage. Underneath it all, there’s the nagging feeling that Bea’s shocking death wasn’t what it was claimed to be. And before the weekend is through, the truth will be unleashed—no matter the cost….
************
Main Characters:
- Luna – photographer; suffering from a degenerative disease that’s causing her to go blind; shared a flat with Kaea, Vansi, and Aaron at university
- Darcie – engineer and lifestyle influencer, sister to Bea (who died), parents died before Bea’s 18th birthday, married to Ash, reunion is at Darcie’s family estate
- Ash – also an engineer, dated Bea before her death
- Vansi – ER nurse, Luna’s best friend, married to Phoenix, having marriage trouble
- Phoenix – surgeon-in-training
- Kaea – high-powered criminal defense lawyer, active outdoorsman who loves to hike
- Aaron – accountant, loves to cook, has dreams of opening a restaurant, engaged to Grace
- Grace – went to boarding school in Switzerland and then stayed in Europe for university, not one of the core group of eight friends
Trigger warning: suicide
A classic locked-room mystery, There Should Have Been Eight takes place in a partially rundown mansion on Darcie’s remote coastal family estate in New Zealand. Nine years prior, Darcie’s sister Bea committed suicide, and the relationship between the seven remaining friends was never really the same. Darcie, now married to Ash (Bea’s former love), invites the other six friends, along with Aaron’s new fiancée Grace, for a reunion of sorts.
The story is told by Luna, a photographer who is gradually losing her sight. Luna hadn’t planned to respond to the invite until she finds out everyone else is going. She decides this is an opportunity to reconnect with her old friends and capture as many photographs, both physical and mental, before losing her sight completely.
When the group becomes snowed in and people start to get hurt, go missing, fall ill, someone clearly has it out for certain members of the group. Everyone is a suspect, no one seems safe, and as Luna tries to figure out what’s going on, her failing vision combined with a loss of power and a snowstorm makes for an interesting mystery.
Luna seems to have had an unhealthy obsession with Bea and willing to do anything for her. She talks a lot about Bea as if she was a romantic interest but claims over and over that it was a platonic relationship. Bea is “her person,” but the way Luna speaks about Bea, I don’t believe it. Darcie didn’t tell the friends what happened until after Bea was cremated, and Luna never got closure, and it seems to have a major mental hold on her. Even though Luna narrates the story, we can’t really trust her either.
There are plenty of twists in this story. There are also some things I figured out earlier than I think I should have based on how the book ends, and it takes a long time to get there. And I have to say, I’m not totally crazy about the twist ending. I won’t give it away, but it feels inauthentic and a little bit like an easy way out to explain everything.
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