3 Stars
Justine, nearing her 30th birthday, is a fairly successful actress living in Toronto with her husband Elias. While in England she sabotages an audition and decides that she is going to give up acting. When a man on a train offers her a business opportunity that would allow her to stay in London, she eventually decides to abandon her life in Toronto though she doesn’t really know what she is looking for. Living in London, she spends time reflecting on growing up with her artist mother and her marriage to Elias while meeting people who are also searching for their place in the world.
Justine is experiencing an identity crisis. She wonders whether she has ever lived authentically. She sees herself as “an outsider dropped into a system that had been desired and put together by someone else. That if I scratched the surface of my life, my nail would pierce a flimsy laminate and poke out the other end.” She thinks, “It seemed equally implausible that I’d ever move through my life with the conviction that I was moving the right way and that my whole self was moving with me, that I wasn’t, unwittingly, leaving crucial bits behind.” Like a character in a novel, “’She keeps thinking she’s just one move away from living in the right place.’” She believes she has been acting, not living: “I’d let acting wriggle its way into my life so insidiously and so completely that parts of my life and parts of my acting had become indistinguishable from each other.” In essence, she feels like a “pitiable fraud.”
She definitely feels that her life has been designed by others: “my whole existence was distracted, that nothing seemed of my own design.” Certainly, it is her mother that steered her into an acting career. Justine even hates that Elias gave her boots he chose for her rather than gifting her ones she had loved. She is so focused on wanting to make decisions for herself that she resents a cosmetics saleswoman using the pronoun we and wants to do something to “force this woman to be herself”! That woman makes a suggestion about a lipstick colour, but though it is flattering, Justine is “unable to let her win” and refuses to buy it. Though we’ve all probably wanted to escape our lives at some point, Justine’s behaviour often comes across as petty and petulant.
Rachel, Justine’s mother, is an artist who has certainly scarred her daughter. To say that she is non-maternal would be an understatement. She is self-centred, impulsive, sexual, needy, and manipulative. Her treatment of her daughter and others in her life is difficult to excuse. Justine’s description of her mother as a “sick woman” is spot-on.
Justine admits that “it seemed to take me more time to process the world and figure out how I felt about it” so the sojourn to London is an attempt to give herself that time, “cracking old habits, clearing out my closet and figuring out what to keep and what to discard.” It does, however, take her an inordinate amount of time to realize that some relationships may seem “all-consuming for a time but [are] ultimately doomed to fail”: something may seem “tragic and insurmountable in the short term” but sometimes “There is nothing to be done” except move on. I kept wanting her to just get over herself and accept that “her suffering was not hers alone but one of many variations on a universal theme.” Justine’s actions at the end suggest that she has decided what is important and what to leave behind.
Normally, I enjoy reading interpretive literature that focuses on journeys of self-discovery, but this one just didn’t appeal. Perhaps the almost-total lack of action, the near-constant self-analysis, and the glacial pace are to blame. Perhaps it’s my stage in life which makes me impatient with such intense self-focus. Justine does indeed need “something acerbic and fresh that would knock [her] out of [her] head.” It is not a bad book, but it had limited appeal to me.
Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley. Quotations may not be exactly as they appear in the final copy.
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