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My Real Children by Jo Walton
You know, I was going to save this one for next week's ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fffriday, but it's still almost Friday, plus it's the first day of Pride Month, so this book seems highly apropos to that -- there's a central lesbian relationship as well as a number of peripheral characters who are various flavors of queer and/or poly.
This book comes with a major content warning: if you have issues with fictional depictions of age-related dementia, this is really not the book for you, because the protagonist suffers from it and her slow decline into full dementia is described in a lot of detail from her POV.
However, I absolutely loved the book, far more than I expected to. All I knew going into it was the main premise: the protagonist is an elderly woman in a care home who suffers from dementia and can no longer remember the details of her life. Or perhaps more accurately, she remembers too much; she has memories from two different lives, with different spouses and different careers and different numbers of children, and she isn't sure which one is real, or both, or neither. You get all of this in the first few pages of the book.
If you want to discover the rest of the book unspoiled, I'll put the rest of this review under a cut. No major spoilers, but more detail on the book's plot and themes.
The differences hinge on a decision she made in the late 1940s to marry her very religious college boyfriend or not. Whether or not she says yes sends her life down two different tracks: in one, she gets married and ends up as a 1950s housewife. In the other, she falls in love with a woman, and has a very different life. The book follows both her lives in parallel, alternating chapters.
Like most people, I imagine, I've fantasized about my life if I'd made different decisions. When I was younger, I used to be deeply frustrated by the fact that you can't possibly live all the life possibilities that are open to you, and many decisions are mutually exclusive: you can't both go to college or go straight to work out of high school; you can't move to two cities at once; you can't both marry and not marry someone. This book is the literary expression of that sense of frustration. What if you could look at multiple versions of your life and see what would have happened, all the various butterfly-effect outcomes, all the lives you could have lived? How different would they be? How different would you be? And in addition to the interesting aspects of watching her life unfold in different directions, I really loved the characters and loved watching them develop, as you watch her kids being born, her marriage going in different directions, her career evolving down different tracks. It's essentially two paired literary novels about a woman living through all the many political and social changes in postwar Britain and Europe, but experiencing different aspects of it due to her different life choices. The book is both lovely and sad because the characters are all very compelling, so watching their lives unfold is delightful and yet at the same time you know it's going to lead to the main character being in a nursing home, alone, reflecting back on all of this, so there's also the gut-punch aspect of knowing from the beginning where it all goes.
On a side note, one thing I appreciated quite a lot about this book is that the protagonist and her wife are not the only queer couple in the book, nor is her "gay married" life track the only one in which queer characters exist; it's just that in her other life, she's not directly involved with the LGBT community in the same way.
There's also another aspect to the book which I'm going to set off in case you want to experience this unspoiled, because figuring it out on my own was really delightful, but it's an important enough aspect of the book that I also wanted to talk about it a little bit. Again, no major spoilers aside from premise-related ones.
.
.
.
Spoiler space
.
.
.
Neither of the worlds she's living through are actually our world. For me, it took about a decade or two postwar to start catching onto the differences. At that point, the game of "spot the historical differences" becomes half the fun of the book. This is not just the story of two different versions of one woman's life, but also two different alternate histories of our world, each one different in a thousand large and small ways.
fffriday, but it's still almost Friday, plus it's the first day of Pride Month, so this book seems highly apropos to that -- there's a central lesbian relationship as well as a number of peripheral characters who are various flavors of queer and/or poly.This book comes with a major content warning: if you have issues with fictional depictions of age-related dementia, this is really not the book for you, because the protagonist suffers from it and her slow decline into full dementia is described in a lot of detail from her POV.
However, I absolutely loved the book, far more than I expected to. All I knew going into it was the main premise: the protagonist is an elderly woman in a care home who suffers from dementia and can no longer remember the details of her life. Or perhaps more accurately, she remembers too much; she has memories from two different lives, with different spouses and different careers and different numbers of children, and she isn't sure which one is real, or both, or neither. You get all of this in the first few pages of the book.
If you want to discover the rest of the book unspoiled, I'll put the rest of this review under a cut. No major spoilers, but more detail on the book's plot and themes.
The differences hinge on a decision she made in the late 1940s to marry her very religious college boyfriend or not. Whether or not she says yes sends her life down two different tracks: in one, she gets married and ends up as a 1950s housewife. In the other, she falls in love with a woman, and has a very different life. The book follows both her lives in parallel, alternating chapters.
Like most people, I imagine, I've fantasized about my life if I'd made different decisions. When I was younger, I used to be deeply frustrated by the fact that you can't possibly live all the life possibilities that are open to you, and many decisions are mutually exclusive: you can't both go to college or go straight to work out of high school; you can't move to two cities at once; you can't both marry and not marry someone. This book is the literary expression of that sense of frustration. What if you could look at multiple versions of your life and see what would have happened, all the various butterfly-effect outcomes, all the lives you could have lived? How different would they be? How different would you be? And in addition to the interesting aspects of watching her life unfold in different directions, I really loved the characters and loved watching them develop, as you watch her kids being born, her marriage going in different directions, her career evolving down different tracks. It's essentially two paired literary novels about a woman living through all the many political and social changes in postwar Britain and Europe, but experiencing different aspects of it due to her different life choices. The book is both lovely and sad because the characters are all very compelling, so watching their lives unfold is delightful and yet at the same time you know it's going to lead to the main character being in a nursing home, alone, reflecting back on all of this, so there's also the gut-punch aspect of knowing from the beginning where it all goes.
On a side note, one thing I appreciated quite a lot about this book is that the protagonist and her wife are not the only queer couple in the book, nor is her "gay married" life track the only one in which queer characters exist; it's just that in her other life, she's not directly involved with the LGBT community in the same way.
There's also another aspect to the book which I'm going to set off in case you want to experience this unspoiled, because figuring it out on my own was really delightful, but it's an important enough aspect of the book that I also wanted to talk about it a little bit. Again, no major spoilers aside from premise-related ones.
.
.
.
Spoiler space
.
.
.
Neither of the worlds she's living through are actually our world. For me, it took about a decade or two postwar to start catching onto the differences. At that point, the game of "spot the historical differences" becomes half the fun of the book. This is not just the story of two different versions of one woman's life, but also two different alternate histories of our world, each one different in a thousand large and small ways.
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Did you think that the protagonist's choices changed the world in terms of the bigger picture, or just changed her own life?
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Did you think that the protagonist's choices changed the world in terms of the bigger picture, or just changed her own life?
No, I didn't read it that way - which I think might explain part of our different reactions to the book. Or, I guess, the way I read it is as a thematic whole with her comment to the nurse in the first chapter that anyone can turn out to be famous or important, but you'll never know just from meeting them as un-famous people. ANY decision could be that important, you just don't know, but there's no way to know if that particular decision made any difference to the world or not. Maybe it did and maybe it didn't (she doesn't know, either), but that just makes it like any other decision we make - maybe it's the most important one, maybe it doesn't matter, maybe it'll change the world and maybe it won't, maybe it'll only matter to you and the people you love, but still have big effects on you.
But I didn't feel like the author was necessarily coming down on the side of that specific decision being THE decision; in fact, I feel like if she had stated it for certain, it would've undermined the "everyone matters" theme by making the heroine Just That Important.
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I LOVE this book. I love the ending, even though I normally HATE that kind of ending. I love how she's still herself in both tracks, so to speak, even though different parts of her end up highlighted.
*spoilers*
I feel like there's something really interesting about how the worlds she lives in seem to bely her *experience* of the world (while she herself is happier in one, the world is less kind, and vice versa). I find reading between the lines about the relationships her (adult) children have with each other really intriguing, too.