Literature of the Flip

The phrase had legs. “The Flip,” capital-F: Coined by Dolly Alderton in her 2024 bestseller Good Material, it flew across the public consciousness by way of TikTok, tabloid media, and womanly word-of-mouth. The novel follows Andy, 35, a struggling comedian who begins Good Material freshly grieving after his breakup with Jen, his girlfriend of four years.

What does it mean to Flip? I’ll let Andy take it away:

“Jen was the one who wouldn’t leave me alone in the very beginning. Then about three and a half months in, something shifted. I became the person who was more interested, who was pushing for more time together… The person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.”

The Flip is that sinking, desperate realization that suddenly, you’re the one who has fallen harder. Common symptoms include: double-texting, ruminating. I’ve Flipped; probably you’ve Flipped; certainly, the bloggers and book clubbers who so responded to Alderton’s novel have Flipped. I, for one, found in Good Material a moment of comfort in the realization that I’m not alone, that there’s a name for this thing that happens to me.

It was a fleeting comfort. Yes, I now know that I can say “I Flipped,” but why did I Flip? Alderton’s novel stages a series of reversals of relational affection (Andy, later, will find himself on the other side of the Flip), but while her sketch of the phenomenon is straightforward (see above), any insight into its causes and intricacies requires more strenuous investigative reading. Again: Why did I Flip, or Andy Flip, or you Flip? Inquiring, love-stricken minds want to know.

The tabloids had one take. As is its wont, the internet-clicks industry quickly moved to gender the phenomenon. ‘Men grasp it [the Flip] more due to their “logical thinking,”’ the Daily Mail claimed. Andy may be helplessly subject to the whims of the Flip, but his gender supposedly affords him the perceptiveness to recognize what’s happening, while the poor women of the world are left to suffer in confusion. Congrats to the men, I guess.

You don’t need me to tell you not to believe everything you read in the Daily Mail. I, a woman who hopes she is perceptive, have very strong doubts about this explanation. Certainly the gender dynamics of the Flip are more complicated than the above.

Contra the tabloids, I hope that the following will provide a more rigorous investigation of the Flip. In my quest for answers, I found myself considering a work that predated Good Material by 111 years — Proust’s Swann’s Way, the first volume of his À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and, in my humble opinion, the true great novel of the Flip. Let’s find some answers.

***

“Swann in Love,” the long middle section of Swann’s Way, follows its titular gentleman Charles Swann — who, in fact, does not begin the chapter in love. Rather, he experiences a Flip for the ages, beginning the chapter indifferent, ending it besotted, desperate, and ignored.

When Swann meets his future beloved, Odette de Crècy, we get this:

…she had seemed to Swann not without beauty, certainly, but of a type of beauty that left him indifferent, that aroused no desire in him, even caused him a sort of physical repulsion, one of those women such as everyone has his own.

A bit harsh! In the early pages of the chapter, Odette pursues Swann and Swann grudgingly indulges her attention. Unlike Good Material, Swann’s Way lingers longer on the painful progression of Swann’s Flip. First, an insight into his pre-Flip mindset:

…when Odette had left, Swann would smile, thinking of how she had told him the time would drag until he allowed her to come again; he would recall the worried, shy air with which she had begged him once that it should no be too long, and the expression in her eyes at that moment, fastened on him in anxious entreaty, which made her look so touching under the bouquet of of artificial pansies fastened to the front of her round white straw hat with its black velvet ribbons.

He doesn’t much like her, but he likes that she likes him. What seems important is that, despite his apparent disinterest, Odette lingers in his mind. We’ll see that this imagining — thoughts of the other without their presence — will be a crucial Flip precursor. We can see it develop in Swann (with one Proustian digression eliminated, apologies):

As he thought of her this way when he was alone, he was no doubt merely turning over her image among those of many other women in his romantic daydreams; but … the image of Odette de Crécy came to absorb all these daydreams, if these daydreams were no longer separable from the memory of her, then the imperfection of her body would no longer have any importance, nor would the fact that it might be, more or less than some other body, to Swann’s taste, since, not that it had become the body of the woman he loved, it would be the only one capable of filling him with joy and torment.

My case is that the Flip takes place not in the presence of the future beloved, but in their absence. Odette is prominent in Swann’s mind because of her persistence — calling on him, hoping to see him. In her physical absence, she can become a mental stand-in for whichever women Swann does want. She’s a safe vessel for his fantasies, because she is secure — she likes him more than he likes her, as far as he knows.

Swann spends some more time with Odette; they eat dinner, they drink tea. Swann carries on with a “plump little working girl” who is more his type. A fulcrum of Flip comes when Swann, observing a portrait of Zipporah by Botticelli, notices a resemblance to Odette. Proust writes:

The words ‘Florentine painting’ did Swann a great service. They allowed him, like a title, to bring the image of Odette into a world of dreams to which it had not had access until now and where it was steeped in nobility.

Suddenly, Odette is beautiful to Swann. What happened? Her perceived vulnerability — she loves him — led him to think of her often, as a stand-in for other women, and then the threads became tangled, she became beautiful, and Swann — desiring love, a story to tell himself — became infatuated.

It doesn’t end so well for poor Swann. His love grows as Odette’s lessens. He finds himself devoted and obsessed, lurking outside Odette’s window, afraid she’s up there with other men. She is. ‘Swann in Love’ marks his thorough debasement, until he finally accepts that Odette no longer loves him.

He speaks the final line of ‘Swann in Love’: ‘To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!’

It happens to the best of us.

***

Between Swann and Good Material’s Andy, we’re starting to get a sense of things. Andy, like Swann, was a serial dater before he met Jen. The passage figuring Odette as a vessel for all Swann’s other girls seems to be key. The word might be transference — somebody who seems to really, really like you is a safe person for daydreams, but daydreams start to take on narratives. Odette becomes a Florentine masterpiece, Jen becomes a girlfriend.

I will share, as aside and illustration, a sidebar on a Flip of my own: I read Pride and Prejudice too young, when my brain was far too squishy. A few teenage years later, a boy texted me that he liked my article in the school newspaper — nerds in love! — and because he was thus available, and also tall and awkward, he became Mr. Darcy. I was a goner. Suffice to say it did not work out.

Good Material is titled thus because, ultimately, the heartbreak becomes the content of Andy’s next, supposedly excellent, comedy set. A Flip throughline, from my Austen fantasies to Andy’s desolation, seems to be a desire for a storyline, into which a ready love interest is inserted.

Swann’s Way hammers home, also, that the Flip is decidedly gender-neutral — again, don’t believe everything you read in the Daily Mail. We are all wont to tell ourselves stories, and to get burned.

Thank you, Proust, for the insight into the Flip victim. But what about the Flip perpetrator?

***

Back to Alderton. We get, in Good Material, insight into two unwitting parties to a Flip. One is Jen, in a short section from her point of view; the other is Sophie, Andy’s 23-year-old rebound.

Sophie, somewhat thinly sketched, doesn’t offer us much beyond a funny-cringe passage where a newly disinterested Andy offers to return her scarf, forgotten at his apartment, by mail. What Flips around comes around, apparently.

Jen is different. At the close of Good Material, we switch to her first-person narration. We learn why she was charmed by Andy: his humor, his conversation, his good nature. We also learn that she’s always been content alone, never in a long-term relationship. Shortly before she meets Andy she decides, self-consciously, that she ought to give it a try — this boyfriend thing. She does like him, until his flaws become too much to bear, and then she breaks up with him.

Jen’s desire — this boyfriend thing — is another type of story she tells herself, another type of distance from the actual object of her feelings. It’s something about her which Andy never quite understands. For all that Andy resembles a slight caricature of the oblivious heterosexual man, this bit of folly is universal. A naive hypothesis of the Flip would be that an excess of interest repulses the other person, but Jen shows that this is not necessarily the case and certainly can’t be taken as law. Sometimes the reasons are more complicated. We never quite know who we are in other people’s stories.

So the Flip is born of the distance between the Odette of real life and the Odette of Swann’s head. It happens when we start to daydream. Somebody is in love with us, so we think of them, latch onto them, fall for them. Then we never know what will happen next.

***

Is there any hope? Alderton’s feat of observation is admirable — noticing the Flip, elucidating it, naming it — but it makes things feel a bit bleak. Certainly the Daily Mail coverage is quite doom-and-gloom for us women.

My case: assimilate the Flip. Uncapitalize the ‘f’ — think of it just as a part of love, life, and storytelling. Read Proust. Accept that you’ll never quite know what’s in another person’s head. Let yourself daydream — it’s inevitable — but try to keep the beloved in your mind’s eye in your real eyes too.

By Haley Zimmerman for CRoB Digital, edited by Sydney Motl

Artwork by Emily Lawson-Todd