Am I Me?

54. Await Your Reply 

“There are so many people we could become, and we leave a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?” – Dan Chaon. Truth.

I literally said, “Wow!” at the end of this one.  It is three seemingly separate story lines that weave together to reveal a truth at the end, and while I wouldn’t really call it a thriller, I would say that the shifting back and forth from each story propels the plot along and made it quite hard to put down.  One thing that really helped was that no specific time frame is given and so each story kind of revolves in its own world (until you realize that it really doesn’t.) All of the stories include characters that change their identity for one reason or another.  With the advent of the Internet it seems that this is a fairly easy thing to do, but it is also something that people have been doing for much longer.  Don’t we all want to leave our hometown at some point and "become" something?

These shifts in identity lead to my one complaint, and I am sure it is a common one, as a reader you felt a bit detached from things because you aren’t drawn close to many of the characters. But wasn’t that the point?  We as readers can’t know the characters when they keep changing who they are and leaving who they were behind. You can’t know fully developed characters because they haven’t developed yet. They are just names and documents. 

The truth in life is that we know what people want us to know about them.  We don’t really know ourselves. We highlight our positives and hope the negative fades away. Would we really say no if someone said we could start all over? All the characters say they are hoping to find someone who truly loves them. Is that what makes us real?  When we matter to someone else?