Her Fidelity
Katharine Pollock
Her Fidelity
Katharine Pollock
Her Fidelity is the comedic, confessional story of 29-year-old Kathy, who is in a state of arrested development.
Kathy has accidentally continued working at Rocking Donkey Records, an independent record shop in Brisbane, for fifteen years. She started there as a total fangirl high schooler, stayed through university, and oops, suddenly 30 is on the horizon and she’s still dealing with mansplaining music bros both at and behind the counter, and measuring her self-worth by her knowledge of Nick Cave’s back catalogue. When the daily grind of working in the male-dominated record industry gets her down, Kathy finds solace in her two best friends: fierce forty-seven year old colleague Mel, and Alex, whom Kathy has known since preschool, a straight-laced accountant and mother of a young son.
When Mel announces that she is leaving the Rocking Donkey and moving to Sydney, cracks appear in Kathy’s comfortable indie bubble. Her friends are clearly moving on with their lives, while Kathy is stuck in a cycle of record store, pub, repeat. A fight with Mel and Alex makes her realise that she has internalised much of the misogyny she has experienced over the past fifteen years and that she can be more than her taste in music. In fact, it’s actually okay to like Beyoncé even if Beyoncé doesn’t write acoustic ballads about alcoholism.
Meanwhile, Kathy meets shy, self-effacing Patrick. Their burgeoning romance is impeded by bungling interactions, and a one-night-stand with Jake, who she met at a party at her boss’s place. After a stealthing incident, Kathy realises this is less bad sex, and more bad guy. Jake embodies everything that Kathy realises she needs to fight. She and Mel take measures to show the guys at the Rocking Donkey, and elsewhere, that the times, they are a-changin’.
This is a funny, pop-culture-saturated feminist coming-of-age story that will appeal to anyone who loved the bookish musicality of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, the wicked humour of Caitlin Moran, or anyone who has ever turned to Stevie Nicks for advice while ignoring the sensible people around them.
Review
Roland Bisshop
It is now 27 years since Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was first published. 27 is an inauspicious age in the annals of rock and roll. Saturn’s return. Those who perished aged 27 include Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, among many others. It seems appropriate, then, that now is the time for a retort to Hornby’s classic from the female perspective – arguably, it’s long overdue. Enter Katharine Pollock’s Her Fidelity.
Having earned her stripes at Dusty’s Records after years of service in what she had, in her youth, imagined to be her dream job, Kathy ultimately recognises the depressing cul-de-sac of her career trajectory. So, she begins her cost-benefit analysis through the haze of all-too- frequent post-work drinking sessions. On one such evening she stumbles (literally) across her future lover. Unlike any of the men she currently associates with – and on that score alone – his candidacy is high.
Standing at the crossroads, Kathy seeks counsel from her best friends: Mel, longstanding colleague, confidante and invaluable ally; and Alex, a friend since forever, and so successful in her buttoned- down white picket life. From them she receives the blunt sermon she needs to awaken herself to her own narcissistic behaviour. Soon Kathy will have to choose between her dream job and her dream man. Or will she?
Pollock is a record store veteran, survivor of the toxic, male-dominated workplace thereof, and friend and former colleague of yours truly. Firstly, I must declare that I know that some of this novel is autofiction, and there are many familiar characters and scenarios. Beyond this fact, however, Kath has managed to craft a work of fiction that delivers a richly rewarding plot with credible players. Her Fidelity is a feminist coming-of-age story full of hip and sassy humour, and charming to the end.
Roland Bisshop is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
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