A work of fiction that takes the form of an autobiography of a 30-year-old, from birth to tentative initial recovery from devastating trauma. It is a narrative orchestrated by an outspoken “I” that is candid, intelligent, likable, life-embracing, protean, chatty, smug, and mischievous. A self busy being a self: watching itself, blind to itself. An eating disorder receives a couple of lines. Loss of parents is absorbed quietly. When, at university, the narrator suffers what she calls an “existential crisis,” she says, “But it doesn’t make for interesting reading, I’ll be the first to admit it,” and later adds, “We all go through it, we all cope with it, or try, so why talk about it?” So she doesn’t. This is primarily a self counting its satisfactions in that obsessive-complacent way that selves have. A self hugging itself and spinning round. A self dusting itself off after a spill before soldiering on. There are fine, largely celebratory accounts of earliest childhood memories; of masturbation (yes!) and shitting, a good deal of shitting; of life at a boarding school readers will think they recognize; of university days at a university readers will think they recognize; of the narrator’s work on that first unpublished fiction; of trips to Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Mexico, South America; of passionate love affairs (of which there are mainly four, one lesbian and three heterosexual – because twice the narrator, for reasons not clear, spontaneously changes sex).
( Courtesy of Quill & Quire, paperback 330 pages )