Honey Girl

Last week, I looked at a book from 1868. This week, our first sentence comes from a book published in 2021. Morgan Rogers' book, Honey Girl, has already made a half-dozen major reading lists. 

Here's the first sentence: "In Las Vegas, they sell cheap replicas of the love locks from the Parisian bridge for twenty-five dollars." 

When I started writing about first sentences, I thought considering a single sentence in isolation would be a nicely bounded topic. The more I look at them, the more I see how they call upon a great deal that exists outside of them. This sentence is especially dependent on cultural references to create its meaning and its associations. 

Take "love locks." This is the relatively recent practice of fixing a padlock to a public monument to symbolize a romantic commitment. There have been news stories and movies featuring these in the last decade or so. If you've heard of them, the phrase brings the image of a padlock to mind, perhaps thoughts of lovers wishing to make their connection permanent, or perhaps more stories of how city councils need to remove the padlocks when they threaten the beauty, structural integrity, or ease of passage of a bridge. All these stories bring a fascinating mix of personal hope versus public nuisance or permanence versus quick removal into the sentence's associations. If you haven't heard of love locks... then the phrase still holds associations from "love" and "locks" and their pleasant, alliterative combination, but the other resonances don't reach you. 

Then there are the two cities the sentence refers to. "In Las Vegas," starts the sentence; "Parisian bridge" brings in Paris; "cheap replica" falls between the two. Morgan Rogers could have chosen two other cities to link. There are many places besides Paris where lovers have placed love locks and many places besides Las Vegas where businesses sell them. She made a conscious choice to imply that like the love locks for sale there, Las Vegas is a cheap replica of Paris. Las Vegas includes a hotel with the theme of Paris. Romantic stories about Las Vegas often include hard liquor, bright lights, Elvis impersonators, and quickie marriages, while romantic images of Paris more often include wine, twinkling lights, long dinners, conversations, and wedding proposals. The images of the two cities, especially from movies, makes the words "cheap replica" gain extra depth here. 

The sentence ends on "twenty-five dollars." The price holds the emphasized, final place. To know if this price is high, low, or appropriate, a reader needs to know what a padlock costs, what a dollar is worth at the time of the story, and how much less a cheap replica would be than the original. 

The words of the sentence gain much of their impact from a dense foundation of cultural knowledge. Decoding this sentence with a dictionary definition of each word would miss the joint meaning of "love locks" and the associations we hold for Las Vegas and Paris. 

There's one more very important implication in this sentence: Who is it about? The only people we see mentioned are the vendors of the replica love locks. Will this be a book about merchants in Las Vegas? No. Again, because we know the forms of stories, instead we expect that whoever is central in this story bought one of those love locks. We don't yet know if that central character will go by "I," "he," "she," or "they" in this story. We begin to suspect they bought one of these replica love locks. 

That means that protagonist faces all the uncertainty of a cheap replica of a love lock bought in Las Vegas. Will the commitment the lock symbolizes last? Will the love be real or fake? Those questions, only present indirectly in the sentence, create the tension to draw us into the story. 

The first sentence of Honey Girl rewards sharing the author's culture. The language is lovely and the meaning is indirect. The sentence promises more culture, indirection, and beauty to come. That's a strong draw to a reader who enjoys savoring and understanding a subtle story. 

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However you come to my blog, I truly appreciate your reading my posts. Thank you for joining me in this exploration of writing and meaning through the narrow lens of first sentences. 

Photo by Nicola Tolin on Unsplash

Graphic elements by Ken Silbert