I finished if i stay by Gayle Forman on Friday and now I am contemplating whether I should read the sequel, where she went. I will eventually but I think I will explore some other books for now, but where she went will go on my "To Read" list.
I burned through this book -- all 234 pages. As I mentioned in my previous post, I admire how Forman set up the novel that paced the story in a way that I did not want to put it down. I was thinking about this -- was it just that I wanted to know Mia's decision, or was it something else? Wanting to know the outcome was a motivation, yes, but the unwinding of the fabric of Mia's life was also motivating. I wanted to know her past. I wanted to know how everything fit in. I wanted to know what Mia would be leaving and what she would not have anymore if she stayed. So, as Mia contemplated her decision and her life flashed back through her mind, I was right there with her, weighing and balancing the choice. The time counting down, the hospital scenes, and the flashbacks kept the pages turning.
Last week I asked my students about how they might consider passing time in a piece of writing. We briefly looked at an excerpt from Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies (but then ran out of time, which seems to be a theme at the beginning of this school year that I can't seem to shake) where Shapton, in this stream-of-consciousness way, goes from the present (she's swimming laps), to the past in a hotel "shaving" for a swim meet with her teammates then slips into a description of her race visualizing routine at home (is that the past progressive or past-perfect??) to the longer-ago continuous past where a hospital table in her room reminds her of a poster of Alex Baumann that inspires her to launch into the rivalry and life stories of Baumann and Victor Davis, then back to the hotel room, then weeks later from that hotel moment when she is bored in French class. What? That warp of time has me in awe. I asked students where the clues were -- how did we know time was passing and where we were oriented in time?
Forman's time "chapters" (I guess I can call them that) would also be a place for a study of how to structure a flashback into a narrative. This novel depends on flashback to provide the context for Mia's life, and Forman seamlessly travels from present to past and back. She uses several techniques. Some come naturally with the time chapters and some she uses page breaks that signal a jump into a memory. Now that I am paging through the novel, I am wondering if there is a pattern at all. The page breaks within the time chapters go from the present -- Mia's status in the hospital -- to the stories of her past. I just looked at five examples and they all followed this pattern. Each "time chapter" begins with the the hospital (or en route at the beginning) and then the page breaks signal the leap into the past. Something to share.
I am not going to tell you what Mia chose. You should find out for yourselves. I will tell you that I cried as I read the last two pages. Cried and cried. Forman poked at something so human -- our contemplation of loss and love and our ability to negotiate pain that comes from profound loss. That pain I mentioned in the last post that my dad, his sister, and his mother dealt with (the two siblings still deal with) since that awful night in 1964 when my teenaged-later-to-be-my father answered the phone and was told his dad was killed in a car accident (I am not lying here, by the way; he was told on the phone by a nurse). Some of you undoubtedly know that kind of loss, too. So, if you were Mia, and your immediate family was gone -- you were the sole survivor of an accident -- what would you choose and how would you weigh that choice?
Another thing I think is cool is that there is a little discussion section in the copy I have where Forman talks about her inspiration, etc. You all might get a kick out of an author taking you into her ideas and process. So, come on in and borrow the book. Put it on your "too read" list!
