Book Review: I’m Not Done with You Yet by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Jesse Q. Sutanto contains multitudes! Her cozy Bay Area mystery, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers, is one of my favorite books of this year for its large-hearted generosity. Her latest release, I’m Not Done With You Yet, is almost the exact tonal opposite: a psychological thriller involving damaged women doing terrible, murderous things. Both books, however, share an uncanny insight into human motivation, and brim over with an extraordinarily gripping empathy that has you rooting for characters you know, at least in the case of the latter book, that you probably shouldn’t want to succeed.

Jane Morgan is the hapless protagonist of I’m Not Done With You Yet, a midlist author of literary fiction living unhappily in her Bay Area home with her casually overbearing husband Ted. When she receives a newsletter informing her that her old friend Thalia Ashcroft has just landed a seven-figure deal for her next book, she’s blown away. Not just at the envy-inducing price tag, or even at Thalia’s success – if ever anyone deserves the world, it’s Thalia, or so Jane believes. Jane is just overjoyed to get word of Thalia again, who seemed to have fallen off the face of the planet after their time together working on Masters of Fine Arts degrees at Oxford University.

Nine years on, Jane knows she has to do whatever she can in order to be reunited with Thalia. After all, they weren’t just friends at Oxford. No, Thalia was much more important to Jane than that:

I steal glances at her as I type on my keyboard, and just the nearness of her is enough to transport me to that place that writers aim for. Her presence propels me through the doorway, letting the rest of the world melt away. Never before have I come up with such passionate prose, such dark, enchanting words. In class, our teachers and fellow students swoon over my compositions, marveling at the way I’ve managed to cut through the flowery words that writers often fall prey to and go straight to the harsh bones of human emotion. It’s all thanks to Thalia, I want to say, but I keep it to myself. I don’t want to share my muse with anyone.

Since they were parted, Jane has struggled. Their last night together in Oxford was supposed to bind them closer together, but Thalia disappeared and Jane decided to throw herself back into “normalcy,” moving home and eventually marrying a man she now despises. On reading that Thalia will be making a live appearance at SusPens Con in New York City, Jane decides that she’ll show up in order to remind Thalia that they’re meant to be together, forever.

Strong Eminem’s Stan vibes, but Sutanto has far more devious tricks up her writer’s sleeve. As the plot unfolds, moving back and forth in time from Jane’s halcyon Oxford days to her life of grinding frustration in the present, multiple surprises rise to the fore, some as obvious as a bludgeon but others as insidious as a knife in the dark. The end is wholly satisfying for readers such as myself, who deeply appreciate it when characters get exactly what they deserve.

And that’s another thing that this dark tale of rage and obsession has in common with the much more kindly and comical Vera Wong’s. Sutanto cuts deep into the heart of everyone’s motivations, showing why they’re hurting and how, sometimes, outrageous acts are the only ways to keep from suffocating within systems meant to keep the downtrodden trodden down:

That’s something I’d learned from Jayden, Mom’s current “special friend.” Whenever they argue, Jayden looks at Mom a certain way and says, “Don’t be mad at me, babe,” and she sighs and her shoulders slump in defeat, and even at the age of seven, I know what a conniving asshole Jayden is, because telling someone not to be mad is putting all of the responsibility on them. Sure, I may have done something wrong, but YOU do the labor of getting over it. Jayden may be a Grade A asshole, but he’s taught me some really great tactics. And women fall for that shit all the time.

In addition to the keen observations on gendered social structures and cultural clashes – many the more biting for being mentioned only in passing – Sutanto also offers readers a wickedly funny look into the state of modern publishing. Reading this book is like hanging out over drinks with a multicultural author friend who respects you too much to give you anything less than the unvarnished truth, studded with hilarious bon mots and sophisticated critiques of life as it is and not, alas, as it should be. I loved it.