by Lisa See

I’m glad I read it to the end, because I did like the resolution and ended up respecting her ability to craft a plot. However, I did not enjoy the majority of the time I spent slogging through this. A lot of horrible things happened. And it felt like we were always flittering from one plot point to another with little change in tone. Drownings at sea, young girls’ flirtations – it all kind of came across in the same monotonous way.

by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

“The stories told on social media are all, in one way or another, stories that support … a regime of neoliberal selfhood: a way of accounting for oneself that emphasizes resilience & individuality… Individuals seek to improve their access to opportunities through the demonstration of various types of fitness. In telling stories like this, we disenchant our lives. We suck all the shading & feeling out of our own experiences.”

I’ve been looking for ways to verbalize this for a long time. The myth of self-improvement. Fooling ourselves that we’re getting better all the time, when really we haven’t fundamentally changed one iota since age 4. “Believe we’re gliding down the highway when in fact we’re slip-sliding away” (Paul Simon).

“It felt ironic to be looking for a redemptive chord on which to conclude a book all about the limitations of telling one’s life story as a series of victories.” To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, “Life is not a victory march.”

Strange married couple survives 117 days at sea on a life raft. The story speaks for itself. I’m not sure the writing was great. The story stuck with the couple, Maurice & Maralyn, from their meeting, through their ordeal, and then too long after their ordeal was past, at which point things just seem to meander to a sad ending with their deaths by natural causes.