Review
Title: Just Julie’s Fine
Author: Theric Jepson
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Date: 2023
Pages: 177
ISBN: 978-1-948218-96-2
Cost (paperback): $9.95
Reviewed for the Association for Mormon Letters by Julie J. Nichols
Six things to note about Just Julie’s Fine:
- It’s whimsical. It’s funny, it makes fun of itself. It’s fun to read. To wit:
- Every chapter is “Meet [Someone].” And the first one you meet is Mary Sue. In her lovingly helpful Seven Drafts, Allison K. Williams sternly commands her audience to “Kill Mary Sue. Why? Because she’s amazing…a character so special she’s boring as hell to read about. In [your] character draft [the third of the eponymous seven drafts, after “Vomit” and “Story”], you must remove most of Mary Sue’s amazingness. You must give her genuine problems she actually has to learn and grow and acquire skills to overcome…As a writer, your craft will get better if you give your characters real problems, and not quite enough tools to solve them” (132-4, passim).
Ah, has Thauthor of Just Julie’s Fine been reading his Williams? Because that’s almost exactly what this first chapter says: Julie, our protagonist (no relation, alas), is Practically Perfect in Every Way. Thauthor doesn’t know how we’re going to stand her.
When I read this, I almost didn’t want to read on.
And then the second chapter is “Meet the Twins,” Ashleigha and Maddysyn, whose names are painful and whose BYU stereotypic-ness is almost worse than Mary Sue’s. (I did enjoy that Ashleigha is supposed to be going to UVU, where I currently work, but the novel is self-consciously set in 2005 when UVU did not yet exist. Ha! Gotcha!
The twins are madly in love with their roommate Mary Sue (aka Julie). So, for a minute, I’m even less sure I want to read on. Even her dopey roommates love her perfectness.
But wait. Their other two roommates are Jilly and Anastasia. Now, Williams of Seven Drafts fame says, “A Mary Sue may be named Anastasia or Lumina or Raven, or anything else so sparkly-special she can’t get a personalized keychain to save her life. But she doesn’t want that keychain, because she’s not like other girls.” –Italics in the original. Now I’ve absolutely got to assume Thauthor has read Seven Drafts as avidly as I have. Anastasia! And Jilly—Jilly even says she calls herself Jilly instead of Jill so that it will sound more like “Julie.” Jilly is black, “like a shadow.” She gets a chapter to herself later on, a chapter that was one of my two favorites the first time I read Just Julie’s Fine because Jilly’s chapter is frantic with the desire for a Mother, for Yemalla, for a goddess. Mmmm. And Anastasia is a grad student studying Sanskrit. Hmmm. So we have, in this second chapter, best friends (aka “twins), stereotypical Utah BYU coeds who are enamored of MS/J, plus two others (also “twins,” of a sort?) who are all of a sudden quite interestingly out of that box.
So okay. The writing is snappy and, like its predecessor Byuck! (whose protag is LS/J/s brother, though he never does appear in JJF), it takes place in and around Provo and BYU, perhaps, you might accurately be tempted to think, taking on familiar tropes in order to subvert them. For example, early on, almost buried in the descriptions of MS/J’s perfectness are references to her “just [deriving] functions for fun on weekends” and to the socket wrench she carries in her bag. Hmmm. Maybe…
On I read.
I won’t go over all eleven of the “Meet”s, at least not in order, though I will specifically discuss the last one in good time. Just keep this “Meet —” structure in mind. You meet ten suspect characters one after the other as this novel unfolds. At first, you may be put off. You may wonder, what does this character have to do with any of the other characters, and why do I want to meet them if they’re so stereotypical?
But stay with it. Slowly you begin to see connections…and you begin to see that each of them is, in a way, a genuine problem Mary Sue/Julie has to learn and grow and acquire skills to overcome. Underneath the title of every chapter, every “Meet ——-,” is a symbol, a drawing repeated in miniature in the header of every page for that chapter: a stereotypical girl shape for Chapter 1, and two stereotypical girl shapes for Chapter 2. There’s a microphone; the head of a bass guitar; a vest; a set of vampire teeth; a raven; and a cow. Are you intrigued? Each indicates a challenge for MS/J. How she meets them is part of the plot. It’s not about you meeting them. It’s about her.
Pretty clever.
- More familiar tropes, some of which are subverted and some of which are sort of grotesquely exaggerated: BYU FHE groups. The Provo music scene. Certain BYU departments and majors. (Some of those equations in the middle certainly do not represent my major!) Always, that weird “we have to get married” theme that drives Byuck! as well. On Amazon, JJF is subtitled “Generations of Byuck!” It’ll be cool to see if further generations worry about that theme even further. This takes us to —->
- Mary Sue/Julie’s character arc. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that as she keeps on being Mary Sue, loving and healing and solving the problems of all the other characters, she also becomes Julie. (No relation, remember.) The grotesque boys she kisses…the gay folk she befriends…the lonely or shy or fat or otherwise not-stereotypically-ecstatic people she touches and talks to and teases, often to their annoyingly wide-eyed joy—all these lead her away from Mary Sue-ness and toward Julie-ness. In a good way. What that means isn’t too surprising—there are lots of clues laid out in every chapter–but it’s fun to watch happen. And it isn’t marriage.
- In fact, that last chapter is called “Meet Julie Them.” Its drawing/symbol is the same as the first one—a stereotypical girl figure. But its character is someone rather different from the first chapter’s. That choice of last name is no coincidence: Thauthor’s playing with (among other things) gender stereotypes, and Julie remains beautiful and female BUT…
Has she changed? Have all the characters she meets changed her? Or has their perception of her changed?
Or…has ours?
- Yes
That’s the short answer.
This book feels less complicated than Byuck! If you liked Thauthor’s first “generation,” you’ll like this one. The vibe is much the same, right down to the cover. Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno posit, in their fascinating new book Tone, that in literature, “tone” is the accumulation of energy, color, space, and interaction. Well, Byuck! and JJF have the same tone, and it’s immensely appealing, especially if you have any connection at all to BYU or Provo or certain young Mormonish mindsets. Which I do. UVU students are close enough, even if they didn’t become UVU students till 2008. Just Julie’s fine, thank you. Read it, find yourself thinking in snappy sentences the rest of the day, and smile.