Tell me Everything Response

I really enjoyed the author’s straight forward and open tone.  She has done some deep soul searching about her life and has come up with some very insightful and mature observations.  It’s not easy to look back at your own behavior and critique as well as forgive yourself. 

Early on the narrator explains how she became a different person after her stroke transformed her.  The change was profound, and it’s clear time and recovery has put this experience into perspective as she can logically discuss everything from her stroke to her divorce with precision.  The way she described her experience, it was almost as if it had happened to someone else altogether, someone she had been studying for some time.  She described her symptoms in an emotionally removed way.  She would explain a whole host of experiences as if listing the chores performed on a boring day.  These often ran together in run on sentences, emphasizing how overwhelming they were and how there didn’t seem to be any stopping point or break from all that was going on.  In these avalanches of description layer after layer of activity slipped into one another, creating a full image of an emergency room or her downward spiral into depression.  It really felt like the narrator was not the stroke victim, that this was not even her past self, but someone she was in contact with now and then.  It was very detailed but I don’t think it evoked a strong emotional response, I was more fascinated than compassionate. 

The way she described the stroke, as someone looking back at a long ago experience, and in a conversational way, gave her the freedom as a writer to go on tangents, and skip around the time line of her own life.  This aspect of her writing was the most interesting for me, to read a bit about her stroke, then an experience in high school, then back again to the stroke.  It made me relate to the author

and take more of an interest in her as a person than as a medical curiosity.  As the story progresses she used this less and less, and my attention wandered more and more as I disconnected from her and wandered through her memory. 

When the author talks about her short term memory loss I felt that she became stuck, giving the subject way too much time.  Until then the story was rolling along pretty well, but at this particular passage I felt I was in a rut.  There were many stories and metaphors around this concept, as well as a medical description and a break down of the different kinds of memories we have, but I felt lost without her conversational asides mixing it up and keeping it fresh for me as a reader.  I also lost track of her as an emotional being and zoned out a bit with all the new terms definitions. 

One section I really enjoyed was when she was describing her photographic memory and how she would memorize credit card numbers.  She placed the numbers throughout the sequence of meeting a man.  She described their interaction, lacing it with the numbers, secretly taunting them with the hidden power she had over them.  It reminded me of a comic book, how a narrator would have a whole sentence stretch across the scenes of an action.  The numbers echoing over a normal interaction at a bar gave the scene a sinister and haunting feel.  It doesn’t seem like she actually committed fraud, but in this scene she reminded me of the femme fatale character in a noir that after only one meeting stalks you the rest of the investigation.

Because the timeline moved around so much, I felt many of the same stories were repeated over and over.  A little of this would have been fine, but it fatigued me as a reader as I became impatient with reading the same anecdotes again and again.  The author also had to introduce the same scenarios over and over, making me question weather jumping around as much as she did was really worth the hassle.  During these scenes I got the feeling that these were a number of essays stitched together and not a novel that could keep track of itself.  I did find it interesting that she revealed information about herself slowly.  She discussed how difficult hiking was, but it wasn’t until later, when I understood the extent of her heart problem, that I could appreciate how difficult these hikes were for her.  In this case it was interesting to re-examine what those experiences were like for her.

The ending was sudden to me.  In traveling in time I think she took away from some of her forward momentum.  There was a lot of build up for me to when I would get to hear about her divorce, an event she mentioned a lot.  When the divorce finally came up as a subject it was short and without details.  She hinted at much but tells you very little.  It felt anti-climatic to me, I had already heard so many intimate details of her life by now that I was surprised to be shut out of this very important one.  Her relationship with Adam was so integral to her story that his exit from her life with so little explanation felt censored and cut short.

I enjoyed this book and the creative way in which the author put it together, experimenting with a non-chronological biography, and adding bits of whatever she felt fit what she was exploring.  I wish parts of it were more organized, there were times when I felt she brought up concepts but never delved into them as fully as was promised.  What was really difficult for me was the repeat of the same stories and exchanges, I’m not sure that all of those were conscious choices that made the narrative better, they often seemed more like a glitch that kept coming up because of the non linear timeline.  In all I found this story very unique and in a relatively small amount of pages she successfully covered a lot of emotions, and activity, as well as thoughts on both of these.   

 

-Iris Keenan