Bryony doesn’t actually mind being single. So she doesn’t understand why she keeps seeing (ok, sleeping with) Ed, who is perfectly fine, but also only okay. After developing the ick on their fifth date, she resolves to end things – only to receive a call the next day telling her Ed has died. 
Worse yet, he seems to have represented her to his family and friends as his great love. Obviously, it would be cruel to correct them. Then she’s invited to the funeral. It would be equally rude to refuse . . . right? 
Before she knows it, Bryony has been drawn in by the charisma and chaos of Ed’s eccentric family and tangled in a web of her own lies. She’s been guilted into signing up to his sister’s pyramid scheme, she’s in far too deep with several of his nearest and dearest – and to make matters worse she’s experiencing a lot of physical symptoms that are becoming harder and harder to ignore . . . 

The premise of this book pulled me in: a comedy based on someone who is too embarrased to correct a grieving family on the real nature of her relationship with their dead son when they appoint her the role of grieving soulmate. It’s something I can (almost) imagine happening and I wanted to see what Karen Bravo would do with the situation.

The first hour of the audiobook had me smiling. It was amusing, in a cruel-but-socially-acceptable-way to watch Bryony keep digging a deeper hole for herself because she doesn’t want to be impolite or to upset anybody by telling the truth. The characters felt real and the situation was cringe-worthy but it felt like a one line joke, not something that would fill a thirteen hour audiobook.

As I read on, I understood that Lauren Bravo was aiming at something more complicated than squeezing laughs out of an embarrassing situation. As is often the case with English comedies, ‘Probably Nothing‘ is a quietly serious book that looks at the impact on Bryony, a woman who was living a shallow, isolated but mostly contented life, of being embraced as a member of a large family. It explores identity, grief, the maelstrom of love and tension that a large family creates, the impact of being involutarily childless in a family that takes fertility for granted and the ways in which we accommodate one another by the truths we choose not to speak and the delusions we help to sustain.

‘Probalby Nothing‘ was well writtne and well narrated. The humour was low-key and acute and mostly used to amplify the power of people’s expectations on one another. The people felt real, but in a South of England way that I always find difficult to empathise with. I had no empathy at all for Bryony. She was weak, self-absorbed, knows that she’s a little lost and that she hasn’t quite reacged adulthood yet but she still looked down on everyone. That she annoyed me so much is a sign of how well-written the book is but it also made it hard forme to sustain my interest in what happened to her.

About a third of the way through, after the embarrassment of the funeral, I could see that the focus would now be on Bryony’s acceptance into the kind of family that’s she’s never experienced before, one that gives her intimacy and a defined role but where everything she’s being given is under threat from the fraud she’s perpetrated partly through politeness, partly through weakness and parly because she doesn’t want to let go of the identity the fraud has given her.

At that point, I decided to set the book aside. I didn’t like Bryony and I found the family real but overwhelming. This is one of those cases where the book is good but I’m not the right audience for it.

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