If I Never Met You

by Mhairi McFarlane

March 24, 2020 · William Morrow Paperbacks

Buy →

C

More Info →

View Book Info Page

If I Never Met You is a sweet, but very angsty, fake-relationship romance that is let down terribly by its advertising and blurb:

If faking love is this easy… how do you know when it’s real?

When her partner of over a decade suddenly ends things, Laurie is left reeling—not only because they work at the same law firm and she has to see him every day. Her once perfect life is in shambles and the thought of dating again in the age of Tinder is nothing short of horrifying. When news of her ex’s pregnant girlfriend hits the office grapevine, taking the humiliation lying down is not an option. Then a chance encounter in a broken-down elevator with the office playboy opens up a new possibility.

Jamie Carter doesn’t believe in love, but he needs a respectable, steady girlfriend to impress their bosses. Laurie wants a hot new man to give the rumor mill something else to talk about. It’s the perfect proposition: a fauxmance played out on social media, with strategically staged photographs and a specific end date in mind. With the plan hatched, Laurie and Jamie begin to flaunt their new couple status, to the astonishment—and jealousy—of their friends and colleagues. But there’s a fine line between pretending to be in love and actually falling for your charming, handsome fake boyfriend…

I was definitely in the mood for some romantic comedy, and this looked like a really fun, light-hearted, funny read. It’s described as a romantic comedy, with a delightful cartoon cover, and hey, we have a diverse heroine, too, which means with a bit of luck this one won’t have Surprise!Racism (something I’ve encountered a few too many times in my romance reads recently). Also, I love me a fake relationship, and the social media twist sounded like enormous fun.

And indeed, the fake relationship was enormous fun.

It’s just that you have to wade through 130 pages of the most excruciating break-up from the point of view of the devastated heroine in order to get there. Every time you think it can’t get worse, it does – it’s a slow motion train-wreck – and honestly, by the time Laurie and Jamie finally got stuck in the lift together, I was so depressed that I was ready to stop reading.

This is not what I’m looking for in a romantic comedy.

The fun doesn’t stop there, either. Every time things start to get fun, the story throws another piece of misery at us, from the relentless sexism and entitlement of Laurie’s colleagues, to the terminal cancer diagnosis of another character, to the tragic back story involving the death of Jamie’s brother when they were both children, to racist microaggressions, to terrible parents to something that deserves a content warning for its WTFery.

I want to note that with the possible exception of the stuff behind the content warning, these things were all handled extremely well. The story does a great job of looking at grief and guilt and how these things shape us, and also of showing just how exhausting and draining it is to deal with all of this sexist and racist bullshit on a daily basis without making it all a Teachable Moment. There was just way, way too much of it, especially given my expectations of the book based on its marketing.

So, what’s good?

Well, I really love McFarlane’s writing style. Laurie and Jamie have some of the best banter I’ve read in a long time – they are both criminal defense barristers, and I have no idea whether her portrayal of working in a law firm is accurate or not (I suspect the somewhat toxic and competitive Old Boys Club part of it is), but what this means is that you have two characters who are very verbal and good at thinking on their feet, which makes for top quality repartee. When this book is not wallowing in angst, it is hilariously funny.

Here are Laurie and Jamie in the midst of their first real conversation… an hour into being stuck in a lift together.

“How is it only twenty-five past six?” she said, mournfully.

“Yeah, this feels like the film Interstellar,” Jamie said. “If Matthew McConaughey came back to Earth and his daughter’s an old woman, my date’s probably married with three kids by now.”

“Has this taken a real crap on your plans, then?” Laurie said. “Was it a first date?” she said, in a ‘I’m not just an uptight workaholic!’ way, she hoped.

“Yeah, it was. And Gina, twenty-nine, from Sale, is not likely to be impressed at being stood up. We met on Tinder, actually, so she’ll be on to five other standbys after half an hour. Gina twenty-nine from Sale waits for no man.”

[They are informed that it will be another hour before they are let out of the lift]

Jamie turned back and slithered down the wall.
“Permission to cry, Laura?”

“Laurie!”

“Ha ha, oh God, sorry. I’ve got a blind spot where I’m determined to call you Laura. I’m turning into my dad. LOOK IT UP, MARJORIE!”

Laurie laughed again and decided to enjoy Jamie, when he was the only pleasure to be had.

“It’s a very cool name. Is it after anyone or anything?” he added.

“Laurie Lee, who wrote Cider with Rosie.”

Jamie squinted. “Wasn’t he a man?”

“Very good!” Laurie said, “Five points to Slytherin.”

“Oh wow, presumed ignorant. And I’m in Slytherin, am I?” Jamie said. Laurie grinned.

Jamie is, we are told, ridiculously good looking, a womanizer, and completely cynical about relationships. Here he is a bit later in that conversation:

“Put it this way. I’m kind of a communist, when it comes to relationships”

“You think we should all be state owned?”

“I think whenever they fail, we focus on what specific people did wrong within the system, overlooking the fact that the whole institution’s rotten and dysfunctional.

This, frankly, makes him sound like a bit of a dick, which he is, a bit, but part of it is very much about playing a role. One thing I love about Jamie is that once he makes his alliance with Laurie, he is completely on her team, and his wide experience in the dating scene is entirely at her disposal. As a champion bullshitter himself, he is very, very good at seeing through bullshit created by others, and he’s also very good at recognising the sexist and gaslighting behaviour of Laurie’s colleagues and her ex, who are not handling their ‘fauxmance’ well:

“It’s truly warped. Like I should’ve put myself up for bids in a fair and open democratic process and not selfishly decided who I wanted to date myself. He painted you as a borderline sex offender.”

“What a creep. Imagine bullying and intimidating a woman about her choices in her private life and thinking you’re the one respecting her. I did warn you he had a thing for you.”

Jamie doesn’t explain Laurie’s feelings or experiences to her, he just listens, affirms her perceptions, and then adds his own nuance to her analyses. I feel that this is a stroke of genius, to be honest. If you are going to Redeem your Rake, having him start by deconstructing the toxic masculinity in general and the rakish archetype in particular for the benefit of the heroine is a pretty excellent way to go. Such a fine use of his dubious expertise, douze points from me.

Another thing that I find rather endearing about Jamie is his joy in his own self-described brilliance when coming up with ways to manipulate social media – but also his delight in Laurie’s cleverness, even when she is taking the piss out of him (which she does a lot). It’s clear from quite early on that he is absolutely smitten by Laurie, even if he can’t quite acknowledge it, even to himself.

Laurie is a smart and resilient heroine. She has a razor-sharp wit, and doesn’t let Jamie get away with anything, ever. I love her anthropological approach to Jamie – for most of the book she doesn’t even view him as a possible romantic choice – after all, she’s still grieving her relationship with Dan, and Jamie doesn’t do relationships anyway. But she is intellectually fascinated by how the whole dating lifestyle thing works, and sees no reason to hide her curiosity from Jamie:

“Did you get propositioned at the bar?” Laurie said, quietly, awestruck

“Er. Yeah,” Jamie said, bashful and maybe a little bit proud.

“Oh my God.” Laurie didn’t want to inflate an already healthy ego but this felt like going on safari to her. “But… how do… creatures of the night know each other? How do you tell each other is one, like the Freemasons? You could’ve been here with your wife; I could be your wife. I could be barrelling over there, handbag flying.”

I just love the way Laurie’s mind works, and her speech patterns. And speaking of speech patterns, I also enjoyed the very English style of humour and writing. I’ve seen a few complaints about the British language and the pop culture references, but for me, it gave the story a strong sense of place, which I found very appealing.

There is a lot of female solidarity in this book. Laurie’s friends (not the ones she shared with Dan) are awesome and not afraid to spell out vengeance in cherry tomatoes, and I loved Jamie’s best friend, Hattie. Even the mysterious Eve, who may or may not have had a thing with Jamie early in the book and who precipitates the crisis in which all Jamie’s chickens come home to roost, is acting to protect other women from what she believes is Jamie’s dishonest and potentially predatory behaviour. Women – at least the kind of women I like and respect – stick up for each other in this book, and those who don’t are clearly tagged as problematic.

Laurie’s best friend, Emma is particularly delightful – she’s as cynical and highly-sexed as Jamie, but also shares his deep kindness and appreciation of Laurie. There’s a lovely moment late in the book when Laurie is thinking about the night she met Dan – which was also the night she met Emma – and how she felt immediately that she had met the love of her life, and she reflects that, actually, she did – and it was Emma.

As for the romance… well, mostly what we see is this utterly sweet, supportive, snark-filled friendship, which is a delight, and manages to be enough to convince me that, despite the very tiny amount of actual romantic relationship we see, this one is going to work. There are, however, some very romantic moments, most of which occur before the characters declare themselves. Here, for example, is Laurie explaining to Jamie what it feels like to fall in love with someone and want to marry them (while also failing to realise that he is desperately hinting at his emotions for her – again, this is a book that would have been considerably shorter if these two characters, who are able to be frank and vulnerable about almost everything else, had managed to have an honest conversation about their actual feelings for each other, but I digress.).

“It feels like a conversation that you never want to end, I suppose. A renewable energy source. You know how with some people you can’t get chatting off the ground? They’re hard work? Falling in love is the extreme opposite. Endless fascination. It’s effortless. A spark turns into a flame turns into a fire. That doesn’t go out. Unless you meet some leggy ginger whore specialising in Contentious Trusts and Probate.” She smiled.

“Endless fascination,’”Jamie said. “OK.”

“Yeah. I mean, that makes it sound a bit like a one on one seminar with my brilliant old law tutor, Dr McGee. Obviously, there’s the part where you would gladly lick them like an ice cream in any place they asked. I would not lick Dr McGee anywhere he asked.”

(The female solidarity in this book does not, as you may have noticed, extend to the woman Laurie’s boyfriend got pregnant while he was still going out with her. Which is, I think, somewhat understandable on Laurie’s part.)

And for his part, Jamie is very sweet about Laurie’s feelings of intimidation about entering the whole dating scene again after having had precisely one romantic relationship in her life.

“The truth is, I’m terrified of The First One After Dan and it comes out as lairy bravado.”

She surprised herself by being this open. It suddenly felt better to share it than hide it. She’d seen Jamie naked, figuratively speaking, and she felt more able to expose herself.

“Why? I mean, why are you terrified?”

Laurie was embarrassed to say, but the urge to purge herself of these thoughts was greater.

“What if he thinks my body is off-putting, and the way I do sex is boring?”

Jamie laughed. “He won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the last man liked the deal so much he stuck around for nearly twenty years.”

“Hah!” Laurie said. “Thanks”

“I don’t want to disappoint you, but us men, we’re not that different. There’s not that much variety.”

This is charming, but it does bring me to another criticism of the story, which is that Laurie spends quite a lot of the book worrying about what sex would be like with someone who isn’t Dan, who was her first and only boyfriend and sexual partner. But when she and Jamie finally get down to it… they kiss, and then the door is firmly closed. Setting aside my prurient curiosity (look, I find Jamie hot, OK?), I feel like this was a real miss – with so much build up and so much chemistry between them, I wanted to see the resolution.

(Incidentally, remember what I said about Britishisms above? Well, ‘lairy’ was a new one even for me – apparently it refers to people being loud and excitable and a bit obnoxious. I’d only ever seen it used in reference to fashion choices of the loud and bright variety.)

I’m really torn on how to grade this, to be honest. There was a lot about this book that I enjoyed, in particular the fantastic friendship between the hero and heroine (though I would have liked to see more actual romance between them). At the same time, there was just so much depressing and traumatic stuff in this book, and I think it was really too much.

I also think that there was a real problem with pacing. Romance novel or not, I don’t think most people want to spend 130 pages reading about someone’s gruesome relationship breakup. In fact, I started doing the maths at one point, and found that a full third of the book is Laurie dealing with the immediate aftermath of the breakup. The fake relationship then takes another 50% or so of the book, and while this section is great fun, it is also peppered with traumatic events and upsetting behaviours from the other characters, not to mention the inevitable angst as they fall for each other but are each certain that the other one Couldn’t Possibly Love Them.

Friends, this is not a romance novel, and it certainly isn’t romantic comedy. I suspect it’s somewhere in the realm of women’s fiction with strong romantic elements and lots of humour, but honestly, the main themes are around grief and betrayal and recovering from these things.

I think the marketing department did this book a grave disservice. I went into the book expecting fun and laughs and mostly I got angst, and it’s really, really hard to separate my expectations from the book I actually got. But I think it’s fair to say that this book is not well balanced and doesn’t really work as a romance novel – it’s so depressing for so much of the time, and even when things are resolved at the end, there is still plenty of grief and stress in Laurie and Jamie’s immediate future. Will their relationship make it easier for them to face these things? Undoubtedly. But depressed is still not the feeling that I want to have at the end of a romance novel.

I think this is a C from me. There is some lovely stuff here, but also some fundamental flaws. And I’m not sure it delivers on the promise of romance, which is, after all, what we are here for.