lady_schrapnell | I tell you, this is a good life

Last words of the acknowledgment page - which comes after the end of the book - in Gabrielle Zevin's Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac. And this is one of those books which gave me a wonderful, layered reading experience, which made me happy to be a reader, or made me remember how happy I am to be reading. It gave one of those moments when you're reading and loving a book though it's not necessarily comfortable and part of your brain breaks free for a second or two and you think 'Oh wow, this is really really well done" and then you go back to reading engrossedly but that little analytical part is going 'Damn, this is good'. You know what I mean, right? Anybody?

Or maybe not. I'll try to do a little judicious quoting and a bit of slightly less squeeish enthusiasm and see if that does it.

Once again I'm slightly stymied by the difficulty of pulling out passages which show something of the book without spoiling anything for others: this isn't a book which would depend on a reader's not knowing everything that Naomi doesn't know near the beginning, I wouldn't think, but still. I'll try to limit myself to what's told on the back cover and a bit that's pretty obvious once that's been revealed to her.

The book is - as might be guessed from the title - first-person narrative, told by Naomi, who's lost her memory of the last three and a half years in an accident at school. Everything before that time is clear - everything from then on until she wakes up in the ambulance is gone. This could be a pretty cheesy device for a rather pedantic story of self-discovery or re-discovery, or anything but. (My vote's for the second, as will be no surprise by now.) It covers the course of a school year, and, unless my after-the-fact sums are off, Naomi's memory loss lasts the length of a pregnancy. Which works really well, as Naomi has to figure out who she is, or, as the three sections of the book suggest: 'I was; I am and I will'. Some of the funnier parts of the book are those in which Naomi tries to figure out why she's with her boyfriend, and what (if anything) they have/had in common. Who he sees her as, and how (if at all) that meshes with who she sees herself as.

Naomi impulsively cuts her hair (starting with the aim of making it look as it did in a picture from before), and is at her boyfriend Ace's house - his parents aren't there, and when his plans for the night don't go too well he gets a bit cranky and says Naomi's been 'acting weird', which turns out to be mostly about her having cut her hair.

'I hate your stupid hair', he said, his voice rusty with truth, bitterness, feeling. Everything else he'd said the whole time we'd been together had sounded merely confused or frustrated, but this was different. This was unmistakable. This was passion! It was what was missing from every other element of my relationship with Ace. It was what I'd heard when Alice spoke about the play, or Will about yearbook, or Dad about Rosa Rivera. It was what I'd heard when James had said he'd wanted to kiss me in the hospital.

For the record, I didn't know boys could care so much about hair. Maybe this was asking too much, but I wanted someone who felt as strongly about the rest of me.

My favourite passage both made me laugh and gave me the thrill you get when something you feel is really true is presented in a way which lets you see how it underpins the whole story.

Rosa Rivera [soon to marry Naomi's dad], my dad, and I were watching a nature program. Dad still watched them, though he watched fewer now, and when he did, it was with Rosa Rivera or me.

In any case, this particular one was about porcupines. So the guy porcupine will sing a song if he wants to mate, and if the lady porcupine's not in the mood or would prefer a different porcupine, she pretends not to hear him before running away. And sometimes he's completely the right porcupine, but she'll run away anyway because she's not ready. But if he's the porcupine for her and the timing's right, they stand up and face each other, eye-to-eye and belly-to-belly. They really take the time to see each other.

'This is so sweet', Rosa commented. 'He is showing her the respect. Why don't you do that to me?' She turned Dad to face her, porcupine-style.

'After the staring has continued an appropriate time', the TV narrator went on, 'the male porcupine covers the female from tip to toe with his own urine.'

'Please do not ever do that to me, darling', Rosa told Dad.

'His own urine?' Dad asked. 'Isn't that redundant? Who else's urine might he be using?'

The TV narrator advised 'never getting too near porcupines mating', which seemed like sound, if obvious, advice to me.

In a way, it's all about timing, and really seeing yourself and others, and how you can maybe change the ways you see people that might need change. And the parts in which Naomi really isn't very nice are uncomfortable, because the reader is right there seeing her and also seeing everyone she sees, through her and not through her at once. This was what I suddenly snapped into noticing - that Zevin manages to give us a narrator who's struggling and choosing badly at times, or thinking badly about what's going on, without positioning us outside and above that perspective - in an 'isn't this person dumb' kind of above way.

The ending was so satisfying too. I think I can quote a tiny snibbet without giving anything away. Naomi is with someone and they're not talking, and she says 'all that' (never mind what) 'made our quiet a kind of song.' ... 'The kind that you've always known.'

I didn't read the whole interview, because I wanted to get down what I thought without worrying about lifting the author's (or interviewer's) words, but I was extremely pleased to see in this Teenreads Author profile that the first song on Zevin's playlist for the book was The Arcade Fire's 'Neighborhood #1' - a song I love, which has been on many a playlist and burned CD around here. And I'd gone looking for a playlist because it seemed a book which called out for one, in all the nicest ways.