So I just finished another Liane Moriarty book. This one was called "What Alice Forgot". It starts off with Alice falling at the gym and hitting her head, whereupon she loses her memory of the past ten years.
At first it kind of freaked me out, in an existential way, but as the novel progressed I started to enjoy the concept. By the end I was transformed into a whole new person.
Kidding. Sort of. Not?
It came to me (via a free library!) on the heels of another book, a Canadian one, "Courage My Love" by Sarah Dearing, which reminded me (a teeny tiny bit) of an Anne Tyler book I read years ago where an unappreciated wife and mother leaves her life in one town to start a new life in another. Although it was an Anne Tyler novel so our protagonist returns to her old family, leaving her new (and better) one somewhat in the lurch (in my opinion).
I always hated that about Anne Tyler. I'd be getting such a vicarious thrill from the protagonist's new tidy life, chock full of appreciation, and then, boo, she goes back to the old messy one, chock full of petty grievances. For a while I even knew a real life wife and mother who left hearth and home to live in a bachelor apartment with no tv, no internet, just library books and a landline. Everybody in her old family was mad at her but she'd left because she had to and it was fascinating to me, her downsizing. Fast forward a couple of years and she was getting married again and moving into a big stupid house to be a wife and stepmother to a bunch of teenagers. I must have looked so disappointed at her news she actually apologized for it, albeit while gushing with happiness.
The Sarah Dearing novel is no Anne Tyler novel, of course. It's grittier, not always comprehensible to me, and takes place in Kensington Market, where I thought I wanted to live once upon a time until I started viewing its available apartments.
During one such viewing the landlord asked me as my head grazed the ceiling, "How tall your boyfriend?"
Ugh. I hated apartment hunting in Toronto in the 80s. It was always a nightmare, you know. Dodgy and over-priced with rent tribunals backed up to the eyeballs. We did win a case, though, against O'Shanter Developments. The judge even came to inspect the non-existent repairs cited in their reason for jacking our rents 10%. In the end I believe they got 2%. And we got a tenant association (until the feisty go-getting woman who organized it moved, and it fell apart, 'natch).
Dearing's novel has a rough (and, in my opinion, rushed) ending that didn't sit well with me in the same way Anne Tyler's return to home and hearth doesn't, either. Although the last Anne Tyler I read ended in divorce and death, so there's that new twist to her plots.
I guess even Anne got tired of wrapping her books up in a family-sized bow.
(The one time owner of "Courage My Love" had a crush on my older sister, if memory serves. I bought a few bits and pieces from there, none of which survived my wash and wear for long, being pretty much exclusively dryclean only.)
A Liane Moriarty novel is no Anne Tyler novel, either (and I've enjoyed them all) but she pulls off a trick in "What Alice Forgot" that got me thinking so much I believe I actually think differently now.
Spoiler Alert!!
Most of "What Alice Forgot" is Alice being puzzled by how much she and everybody around her have changed, and not for the better, in the ten years she can't remember happening. Her memory has left off at her being an easy-going and fun newlywed, happily looking forward to the birth of their first child with her loving, easy-going and fun husband.
Fast forward the ten years she's forgotten and she's a keyed-up and no-nonsense divorcing mother of three, whose relationships with others have changed, too, and not for the better.
Now, as an aside, until I read this book - I guess there's a reason Liane Moriarty is so popular (she's the author of Big Little Lies) - I'd really not appreciated how reading novels expands our horizons, changes us, sometimes in ways so profound it's like we emerge a different being.
I know! How daft is that? But it was like my brain lit up all of a sudden. All those characters, their lives, their stories, they're part of my life, my story. Finally, I get it. Never again will I think of reading as something to do only when everything else is done.
The remains of the day indeed.
But that's not what this entry is about because this entry is about letting go of the past and all those petty grievances with each other some of us cling to like grim death, how freeing it would be to just... forget about them, like they never happened, wipe the slate clean and go forth in the grace of innocence.
A couple of nights ago I attended a housing association meeting, our housing association having previously caused me a kidney stone, and it was fine. Better than fine. Reassuring. Maybe even pleasant. I realized the people who've been on the board since I walked out of an annual general meeting a few years ago were much better at this thankless volunteer job than I could ever hope to be. And in spite of my concern there'd be no one naive enough to take on the job after them, there were more people running for election than positions to fill.
A miracle. Quorum. Candidates. The newbies all Millennials as Gord intended. And I had nothing to do with any of it beyond encouraging my neighbour to run, which she did, ignoring all my "I'm running because" advice and getting herself elected anyway.
My Blond Companion and I walked back home from the meeting (we'd gone with our other neighbour who never walks when he can drive and has more gas powered tools for his postage stamp sized lawn than an 18-hole golf course but also knows how to do stuff we don't, so...) and while we walked I thought about "What Alice Forgot" and I could practically feel myself letting go a million and one memories that had been weighing me down for years.
It brought to mind a Macedonian of my acquaintance once upon a time consistently, and accidentally, referring to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", a topic of conversation in our 80s office, as the incredible lightness of being. That's what I was enjoying feeling, the incredible lightness of being.
The next day I thought more about the whole forgetting thing and how freeing it would be to let it all go, memories of past relationships, as in memories of relationships that are part of the past, not the present, as well as memories of people as they were in the past, not the present, and relationships in the present that I want to put in the past.
Anybody reading the book would find themselves enjoying the life of Alice who'd forgotten the past (bearing in mind she's otherwise perfectly fine) and rooting for her to go on without it. Cripes, even Alice is torn about regaining her memory of it, so fraught does knowledge of it seem to have made everyone else's present.
Are those cosy memories of reading to three little kids tucked up in bed, playing store with buttons as money, and vowing to live, all of us together, forever and ever lifting me up, lightening my mood, freeing me to embrace how it is now? Or are they really just holding me down, dragging me back, stopping me from fully appreciating my life now, who I am now, how it is now.
Anyway, this is all coinciding with my increase in caloric intake, having finally made the connection between eating to soothe the soul (like reading fiction to expand it), weaning myself off the 10mgs of fluoxetine (Prozac) I've been taking the past several months, and getting geared up to go out and about in this world I suddenly appreciate being just another random cog in the wheel of.
And to prove it, I'm just going leave that preposition dangling, like an illiterate slattern, yes I am.😀
