Flashback Friday comes from Julie Buxbaum’s After You, where the main character Ellie remembers events in her life and the books that correspond.
For me, it has always been about books. I can tell you what I was reading when the Twin Towers fell (White Teeth), or when Lucy crashed her mother’s Buick and broke her nose when she was seventeen (Prince of Tides), or when Greg called to say Sophie had been born, 6lbs, 7oz. (The Accidental Tourist). When in fourth grade, Eric Schwartz passed me a note saying I like you and then asked me to give it to Lucy for him (Sweet Valley High #3, Playing with Fire), and in eighth when Lucy got elected student-body president and I was picked to be delegate (Pet Sematary and Love Story, alternating between the two). When my parents told me they were getting divorced (The World According to Garp) and when Phillip asked me to marry him (Play It As It Lays).
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I have been reading and reviewing quite a few memoirs lately and I am reminded of a book I read after being slightly misled; it was not a memoir at all. At the time, I was in Hawaii, and was unfortunately also misled about the hotel soap that turned out not refreshing at all. Anything that causes hives like that is misleading indeed.
And so I was stuck inside, forbidden from the hot sun and beach, unable to get comfortable as I read The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen. Syrie James is certainly an Austen-0-phile and wraps many of her novels into this fictionalized account of Austen’s life; I wanted to go back and read them all just so I could recognize the references. The account in Lost Memoirs is certainly probable, but very little is known of Ms. Jane’s love life. It’s fun to pretend what might have happened before her tragic young death; just as it’s fun to pretend you’re not stuck inside, itching and miserable, in the middle of paradise. Escaping to 19th Century Britain is a different kind of paradise entirely.
