Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
The joke I kept making as I read Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac was that while I couldn't remember having read it before, it all seemed vaguely familiar. I'm not sure if that means I did read it once before, if it's because I'd read bits and pieces before when I was deciding if I wanted to read it, or if it's because the book is so well constructed that it all fits perfectly together.
Seventeen-year-old Naomi wakes up with amnesia after a fall down the school steps. She doesn't remember the last four or five years and has to slowly relearn her life. There are two things I really liked about the book.
First, I loved Naomi putting together both who she used to be and who she is now. Having no memory means she gets to start over in a lot of ways, and she does: cuts her hair off, breaks up with her boyfriend, renews an old friendship. One of the things that's fascinating about it is that she does eventually regain her memory, and while she remembers who she used to be, she isn't that girl anymore and doesn't try to be. There is one false note in this is: she finds a food diary she was keeping and is disgusted with the kind of girl she was and throws it away. That part is fine, but I expected it to come back up when she regained her memory, and it didn't. It just lingers as a loose end. To Zevin's credit, that is the only thing I didn't like about the book.
The second thing I loved was the way Zevin uses the idea of footnotes - without any actual footnotes to her text - throughout the story. Naomi's parents used to write and photograph travel books: "My mom took the pictures, and my dad wrote the text, except for the occasional footnote by mom." The first thing we know about her life before is a typewritten letter (typewriters are another nice theme in the book) from her best friend Will that is full of footnotes. When Naomi finally figures out what to do for her photography class, it's a series of photos, each one a footnote to the one before. One of my favorites is near the end. Naomi's dad gets remarried, and Naomi is finally at a place where she can be happy for him: "Dad followed the trend with a beige suit that he had bought the summer we had wandered Tuscany. He either didn't care to remember or just plain didn't care that my mother had picked it out for him. A footnote to the day might tell that story: suit picked out by ex-wife."
Seventeen-year-old Naomi wakes up with amnesia after a fall down the school steps. She doesn't remember the last four or five years and has to slowly relearn her life. There are two things I really liked about the book.
First, I loved Naomi putting together both who she used to be and who she is now. Having no memory means she gets to start over in a lot of ways, and she does: cuts her hair off, breaks up with her boyfriend, renews an old friendship. One of the things that's fascinating about it is that she does eventually regain her memory, and while she remembers who she used to be, she isn't that girl anymore and doesn't try to be. There is one false note in this is: she finds a food diary she was keeping and is disgusted with the kind of girl she was and throws it away. That part is fine, but I expected it to come back up when she regained her memory, and it didn't. It just lingers as a loose end. To Zevin's credit, that is the only thing I didn't like about the book.
The second thing I loved was the way Zevin uses the idea of footnotes - without any actual footnotes to her text - throughout the story. Naomi's parents used to write and photograph travel books: "My mom took the pictures, and my dad wrote the text, except for the occasional footnote by mom." The first thing we know about her life before is a typewritten letter (typewriters are another nice theme in the book) from her best friend Will that is full of footnotes. When Naomi finally figures out what to do for her photography class, it's a series of photos, each one a footnote to the one before. One of my favorites is near the end. Naomi's dad gets remarried, and Naomi is finally at a place where she can be happy for him: "Dad followed the trend with a beige suit that he had bought the summer we had wandered Tuscany. He either didn't care to remember or just plain didn't care that my mother had picked it out for him. A footnote to the day might tell that story: suit picked out by ex-wife."