This novel/memoir recounts its first-person narrator’s undergrad-aged navigation of body image issues, sexual assault, Native American racial identity, and bipolar disorder. If that all sounds like a pretty grim cocktail…well, it is. Somehow, though, the author keeps the whole boat relatively buoyant. It’s no mean feat, and owes a lot to the voice of the narrator, which is intelligent, self-deprecating, and at times fatalistic, but which, despite her experiences, seems to trend generally towards optimism. It’s an intriguing and likeable combination; I couldn’t help feeling that this was a person I’d be happy to be friends with.
The structure of the book is non-linear, jumping between a “present” set in around 2009 in Seattle when the narrator is enrolled in a graduate degree, and her past in Baltimore and New Jersey. The styles are also varied; there are no sections that are exactly documentary or epistolary, but straight autobiographical recounting is interspersed with other, more experimental types of writing. As a fan of ironic footnotes, I particularly enjoyed one chapter which consisted of the narrator’s match.com profile, heavily annotated with her observations as to its intentions and veracity.
About halfway through, I was trying to think about how I would describe this book, and suddenly realised that the words that occurred to me were beamed directly through from my Year 12 3 unit English classroom: fictionalised autobiography. They were words I could happily regurgitate in an exam, but, until now, not ones whose essential meaning had really lodged in my brain. It’s an interesting style, and of course a way for a writer to distance herself from questions about the “truth” of a book: after all, there’s no reason to assume that truth can’t be conveyed by invented facts. At least some (if not all) of the novel appears, however, to be both true and factual. Overall, an intriguing and addictive debut from an interesting new voice.
Update: for the first time in my life, after reading this book, I emailed the author to say I liked it, and she emailed back! Within, like, 12 hours! And liked a joke I made! We’re totally friends now.