What if one day you realized you did not remember the last ten years of your life? Would you be happy, sad, scared, indifferent? Alice fell off her bike in Spin Class (a good reason not to try that!) and hit her head. She lost ten years. While trying to recover she learns that her life had become much different than she imagined. She did not remember her children, her friends, the development dispute she was having with a neighbor, nor did she remember that she and her husband had separated and she was seeing another man! Awkward to say the least. Terrifying for most of us.
At first I thought this was a strange premise for a book but was almost immediately hooked by the suspense of the concept. Would Alice revert to her 1998 self? Why had she and Nick split? Who was Gina? Would Dominick win Alice's heart? Since I get most of my exercise jumping to conclusions, here is what I thought: Alice needed to reconcile her two selves into a person she could like again. The fall gave her the perfect opportunity to do so. However, Nick must have had an affair with Gina since she is in the back of her memory in an apparently unpleasant location. Nick swears he was not the one who had an affair--did Alice and Gina have one? I even spent some time trying to wonder if Elisabeth was an alter ego instead of Alice's sister! For a brief moment I thought Dominick was Nick's proper name! Was Frannie actually her mother and not Barb? (I think I have been watching too much TV!)
Liana Moriarty has three plot lines running simultaneously through this book and they all work. Elisabeth is trying desperately to have a child and communicates with her therapist via journaling. Frannie writes letters to a dead finance until Mr. Mustache (Xavier) woos her back from her grief into a loving, living relationship. And Alice--she has to decide who she will be--1998 Alice who was laid back and fun loving, looking forward to the birth of her first child, or 2008 uptight, caffeine driven, exercise pumped Alice. Each plot is drawn to an appropriate ending which I will forego detailing here since all may not have read the book yet!
I think the author was wanting the reader to look deep into our souls and determine if we are happy with our lives as we live them today. If not, how do we become the person we want to be and not the person we are? What parts of our lives would we keep? Would we end a long term relationship that had become difficult in favor of something easier? Would we give up on a life long dream because the physical and emotional drain it was taking? Would we be afraid to take a risk on love and life simply because of loyalties to loves lost? How we answer those questions will be as different as each of us. Liane Moriarty answers these in her fashion while leaving us to ponder our own. I enjoyed this book!
