(by Matt Haig)
I’d kind of been meaning to read this for ages, but I wasn’t sure if it would be good or overly trite/sentimental. As it turns out, I ended up feeling like it was both of those things at different points.
It isn’t a spoiler to say that Nora, this book’s protagonist, tries to kill herself: we learn this very early and it’s what sets off the entire plot. “Between death and life there is a library,” we learn, and “Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you made other choices.”
So Nora, between death and life, bounces from one possible life to another to another. In one life she’s a former Olympic swimmer; in another life she’s a scientist doing research in the Arctic. In one life she and her husband own a vineyard in California; in another life she’s a literal rock star. But there’s something wrong in every scenario, which is part of the point but also where the triteness comes in: there is no such thing as a perfect life and, in fact, there is only your one life and what you do with it.
Although I felt like I could see the ending coming from miles away, and although some of the writing made me roll my eyes (e.g. “Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you”, or Nora realizing that “She had loved her parents more than she ever knew, and right then, she forgave them completely”) I found a lot of this book, especially in the beginning/middle, to be very engaging: it was fun to see Nora’s various possible lives and her reactions to them. And there are some details I really liked, like how in each new life she tries, Nora looks at her watch and tries to guess what kind of person she is, what kind of person would wear that kind of watch and what kind of life that person would have. And I like the phrasing of Nora’s realization that she has no obligation to be “anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.”
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