Geographic Misadventures

London is the Best City in America - Laura Dave
New York: Viking, 2006

This is kinda the best book title ever. Well, perhaps not ever, but still. And eventually, you actually find out what the title refers to. Anyway, this isn't necessarily the book I expected.

What I especially didn't expect was how creepily it seemed to be written for me, in order to smack me around a little and say, um, hello Erin. What is going on? Which is not to say that I've spent three years since running out on my fiance working in a fishing shop in Rhode Island and working on a documentary of fishwives. Or that my brother is about to get married to a girl he's been dating since I was in high school, except that he might be in love with someone else. Or that my brother has a hot older friend who is a chef, which may or may not be important to me.

Some of Dave's pronouncements can be a little pedantic. Emmy is full of deep thoughts and meaningful realizations. But it worked, and, again, it slapped me around a little. Some examples:

• You don't always know what you'll remember. And, still, it was starting to seem to me that -- if you paid close enough attention -- you could sometimes predict moments that were going to turn out to be important, moments that would stay with you. [This is just the beginning of a reverie about the times "already existing closer to memory than reality"]
• You can't really feel anything entirely unless part of you doesn't know it's happening.
• There are moments when you can feel something fall down inside of you, and never rise up in exactly the same way again.
• I said a small, silent prayer of gratitude that tonight was going to end. Not gracefully, maybe, but eventually.
• I felt this incredible relief at hearing him say it -- and then, almost simultaneously, this incredible sadness. If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you go there? Didn't it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?
• Never. I will never be done with you. I will never be able to think about you and hear about you and not totally -- totally -- miss you. [and more thoughts about her former fiance and her intensely complicated relationship. Not with him, but with the version of him that she's held ever since she left him. And later...] I'd remember [him], and I'd remember him wrong. And that was probably when I'd miss him the most.
  
• I really wish that I could begin to describe what it was like seeing her being seen that way by him. It was like watching a memory.
• If this were all we'd have to remember this day by, wouldn't it end up looking like this was the only way it was ever supposed to be? So maybe I was wrong to be questioning it still. What did I know about the way things came together? Maybe they had to come this close to falling about first.

So you see? In fact, the whole thing almost made it hard for me to concentrate on the will he/won't he plotline that ostensibly drives the whole book. And perhaps it does. Perhaps it takes other people's dramas to force Emmy out of her holding pattern. And if that's the case, what are the implications for a girl like me?