Category: Notes on books

I read My Last Innocent Year in my final semester of college, and like Isabel, I had already lost all innocence. Something got left behind somewhere, in the space between knowing you and whatever came after. I still remember those days in terms of what was happening with us. A fragment here, a flash there, and yet when pieced together, they form the final moments where I could have really claimed I’d never done anything bad.

It’s curious how memory works, how the mind reconstructs, piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle whose image is always shifting. Neuroscientists are still unsure whether we’re accessing the same fragment each time, or creating new traces each time we remember. Maggie Nelson says “we don’t merely remember the past; we summon it into existence again, from the ether, assembling fragments and hints, letting them coalesce into something that feels like truth, but is never quite it.”

Isabel Rosen spends her last semester at a New England college in 1998, tangled in an affair with a married professor. The novel is so beautifully written—one of those books that feels like a memory even as you’re reading it. One thing I loved: Isabel’s reflections are so clearly from years later, and the distance between then and now is palpable. Like the 10-minute version of All Too Well —do you remember?

He had seen the end embedded in the beginning in a way I hadn’t. It was how adults behaved, I knew now, and I would never again not see the world in the same way.

I think about that a lot—how some people see the end before you even know there’s one. When you’re young, you assume things will last simply because you want them to. You don’t realize some people enter your life already halfway out the door, or that some stories are over before you understand what they were. That semester, I was half in love, half not, completely consumed. I’d take the long way home every night knowing I shouldn’t. There are worse things to be than reckless, but I don’t know if I was anything else.

I’ve been thinking of EBB’s Sonnet 14 .

Do not say I love her for her smile – her look – her way of speaking gently, for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine

She says, implicitly, I will age, I will change, and I want to be loved for who I am. Not her “smile,” “look,” or “speaking,” but something of soul’s senses. Anyways, this reminds me of marriage in Pride and Prejudice:

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

Spoken by Charlotte, who is so much more pragmatic, or so it seems, than EBB. She is motivated by a desire not to be an economic burden to her parents and, not unreasonably, thinks that the situation with Mr Collins offers her a respectable future. I love the episode in P&P when Elizabeth visits them and takes the measure of the marriage, noting for example that Charlotte has positioned her reading room so that she minimizes exposure to her husband.