– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by Little, Brown and Company on 30 May 2017
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Grief-stricken over his partner’s death, Gavin sets fire to every physical reminder in the couple’s home. A neighbor captures the ordeal on video, turning this unsung TV actor into a household name. Now, Gavin is fleeing the hysteria of Los Angeles for New Jersey, hoping to find peace with the family of an old friend. Instead, he finds Joan.
Joan, the family’s ten-year-old daughter, was born with the rare ability to recall every day of her life in cinematic detail. In seconds, she can tell you how many times her mother has uttered the phrase “it never fails” in the last six months (27) or what she was wearing when her grandfather took her fishing on a particular Sunday in June years ago (fox socks). Joan has never met Gavin until now, but she did know his partner, Sydney, and waiting inside her uncanny mind are half a dozen startlingly vivid memories to prove it.
Gavin strikes a deal with Joan: in return for sharing all her memories of Sydney, Gavin will help Joan win a local songwriting contest she’s convinced could make her unforgettable. The unlikely duo sets off on their quest until Joan reveals unexpected details about Sydney’s final months, forcing Gavin to question not only the purity of his past with Sydney but the course of his own immediate future.
I appreciated how this book had LGBTQIA+ representation without making it a character’s whole identity. LGBTQIA+ people are people and have identities outside of their sexual orientation. They have stories. And you’re going to have to read this book to to discover Gavin and Joan’s.
People have all kinds of reasons for why they don’t remember. They blame it on their batteries dying, or their ears not hearing right, or just being too busy, or too old, or too tired. But really it’s because they don’t have enough room inside their boxes. When I was turning five, Mom bought me a box for all my art. She was fed up with me leaving my drawings and projects around the house. She told me to choose which pieces were most important because there wasn’t enough room in the box to keep everything. That’s how it is with people’s brains. There’s only enough room for the most important memories and the rest gets thrown away. When I’m the thing that gets thrown away, because I’m not important enough, it’s hard not to get the blues like John Lennon on The White Album when he sings, I’m lonely and I wanna die.
I immediately fell in love with Joan. She’s so pure! I loved that this book used simple words, but the ways in which they were used, man, they made you feel things. I think many of us can relate to not wanting to be forgotten. For some of us, it may be a selfish reason; some of us crave the attention. For some of us, it may be an existential reason; what is our purpose and how do we do something that matters? For Joan, it’s simple. She’s a girl who remembers everything. But when she remembers everything and the rest of the world can’t, it’s a lonely feeling.
But then I realized, it’s not people’s fault that they have crappy brains. That’s what reminders are for. Mom never forgets to pay the bills because she has a reminder on her calendar. And Dad remembers to put new batteries in our smoke alarm only because it starts beeping. And no one forgets Martin Luther King because he has his own holiday every year. It works the same way with songs. Everyone remembers John Lennon, even Grandma, because his songs are reminders. My song is going to be a reminder to everyone that they should keep me in their brainboxes, and I have less than two weeks to finish it.
So there’s the heavy stuff. Joan, being forgotten. Gavin, widowed. But there’s also so much love and light and life.
I don’t know if I can wait that long because waiting is the worst thing ever invented.
Okay so maybe talking about the “worst thing ever invented” isn’t the happiest thing to say, but it made me smile when I read it. When I was little, there were a lot of things that were the worst things ever invented. I repeat, Joan is so pure!!
Now I’ve said a lot about Joan, but I think that I’m more of the Gavin in this story, and this book was my Joan. Growing up, many of us lose our childlike wonder; it’s something we could all do with a little more of. Joan was that. We all need more Joans in our lives.
This book was one of my favourite books of 2017. It has humour, it has pain, it has existential crises, it has art, it has… life.
★★★★★
If you like this book, you might like…
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
I’m waiting with my guitar on the hard steps and there’s an ant by my sneaker. She’s just a tiny thing, but I’d rather be that, a tiny thing that no one notices, than a real girl who everyone sees but isn’t worth remembering.
For most people, memories are like fairy tales, which means they’re simpler and funnier and happier and more exciting than how life really is. I don’t understand how people can pretend something happened differently than it actually did, but Dad says they don’t even realize they’re pretending.
I just want to feel better. Maybe I’d be okay if it were just small forgetting, like when people miss my half-birthday or they don’t remember to put suntan lotion on the tops of my ears or they forget that my least favorite saying is Forget about it. But it hurts too bad when the thing people keep forgetting is me.
There’s this idea of the phantom limb. A man who’s lost his arm still feels the arm and behaves as if the arm is intact. What I have, then, is a phantom love.
And now I’m doing it again, allowing myself to be sucked into the past. For what purpose? It’s true there’s a brief thrill that comes with digging up what’s been lost, like the strange joy one feels when poking a tender wound. But when the thrill passes, the wound still remains.
The doctor I saw in Arizona, Dr. M, says I’m the only kid he’s ever heard of who has highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. The rest are grown-ups, about thirty of them, and Dr. M thinks that makes me pretty special. Most of the time I don’t feel special, just lonely. I’d rather everyone in the world have HSAM, especially my parents and my friends, so we could all see the same memories.
I hate wearing the same thing twice because it reminds me of another day when I wore the same thing and then I get stuck thinking about that day instead of living the day I’m in.
If Mom says, “Shut the light when you leave the room,” I’ll remember she said it, but sometimes not at the exact time I’m leaving the room, so I’ll “forget” to shut the light. But that kind of small forgetting doesn’t bother me. It’s the other kind, the big kind, when people forget what happened in their lives, that gives me the blues.
But this place will never look empty to me, it’ll always be full, because everywhere I turn, all around me, I see what no one else sees: the memories.
“Do you like fishing?” I ask.
“No, because it’s mean. Grandpa says fish don’t feel pain like we do because they have small brains, but what if one of them has a brain that’s different from all the other fish? How do you know you’re not catching the one fish that feels a lot of pain?”
Because everyone forgets everything. They forget the name of the second person they ever kissed and they forget about what happened to those twins who were taken apart as babies and they even forget their own grandchildren. And it’s not fair because I would never do that.
If a song hits you deep enough, you never get it out of your system.
Sydney had told me all about Joan, how uncanny it was that she could store so many details in her head, the monumental and inconsequential taking up equal space.
She is something close to miraculous.
He believed you could visualize almost any dream into existence.
Whenever I meet ex-artists, they always look half alive.
The more you experience, the more you have to write about.
“It’s a good kind of nervous.” “I don’t think I’ve ever had the good kind of nervous.”
You forgot the earliest lesson of love: a little discomfort is a small price to pay.
Because it’s too painful to remember. Because it’s even more painful to forget.
It’s not just about waiting around for an idea to come, it’s also about knowing when the idea has finally arrived.
He slides his hand through his hair either because he has great style or because he has a headache, I’m not sure which.
I love thinking about my grandmother but I also hate it, because what happened at the end of her life makes all the other memories I have of her feel less special. It’s like we were playing this great concert together and when we got to our last song of the night, she just left the stage and now I have to face the crowd by myself and sometimes I just don’t feel strong enough to do it alone.
Then again, considering the satisfaction on her face, maybe that’s her point. Being a grown-up isn’t a matter of age or responsibility. For Paige, it’s finally having the power to do whatever the hell she wants.
She’s been living on her own for decades and doing just fine. But that doesn’t mean she never gets lonely.
I know I’ll always have this night saved in my memory but memories are never as good as the real moment, just like a cover version of a song is hardly ever as good as the original.
People think I shouldn’t miss things because I always have the memories of them saved in my brainbox, but the memories only make me miss the things more.
And now Mom is making me feel even worse because she just found a dress that is so great it would normally make me want to jump into the air but instead I just smile like a clown. Clowns have big smiles painted on their faces but they still don’t look happy.
It was then that you discovered his special gift; he had a skill so rare that when people experienced it, they found themselves opening up to him fully. It was simple: he listened.
I know how powerful it can be when someone puts his faith in you.
No one’s ever done that before, spent all that time thinking about just me and who I am and what I’m made of.
But you know what? I don’t think the two things are separate, you and your art. They’re part of the same thing. And the whole point with art is that we try to make people feel something, right?
That’s love, isn’t it? Trusting. Believing.
I’m the adult here, theoretically, but I’m not sure how to handle this situation… All I know is that this little girl nearly made me lose my shit today. And frankly, I have very little shit left to lose.
You’ve got plenty of good reasons not to do it. All I’m saying is, if it’s something you really want, trust me, you’ll figure it out.
I wonder if maybe that’s why people say no all the time, because there are so many things to be scared of.
I fall onto my bed and pull the blanket over my legs. Mom hugs me through the blanket and tells me she loves me and strokes my hair. But none of it makes me feel any better because I’ve got a giant bruise on the inside of my body.
And if we’d never found that perfect one, so be it. We would have been able to sleep knowing we tried. We were true of heart. We were honest. We were open. We believed. What a rare thing, to believe. We were lucky. We could’ve been.
I’m having a hard time thinking about what’s here because I’m mostly thinking about what’s not here. I wish there was a way to know when you were seeing someone for the last time so you could pay extra-close attention to that person when it was happening.
So I write it all out and now I’m clicking the button that makes it go through the wires and across the universe and into his brain so that his brain can be full of all the things my brain is full of. This way he’ll know that it’s okay to go back to the past now because there are a few things back there that are worth seeing a second time.
Because you taught me about the good kind of nervous (Tuesday, July 16) and I finally felt it (Tuesday, July 30).
You just have to keep making art that feels good to you. You can’t control what happens after that. It seems like no one’s paying attention, but then, when you least expect it, someone hears it. Just keep putting yourself out there. It’s the hardest thing. But you never know. That’s it. You just never know.
Wanting something so badly is tiring.
We just need one song. That’s all it takes. One song that the whole world never forgets.