Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies's Reviews > Maybe in Another Life

I have no apartment and no job. I have no steady relationship or even a city to call home. I have no idea what I want to be doing with my life, no idea what my purpose is, and no real sign of a life goal. And yet time has found me. The years I’ve spent dilly-dallying around at different jobs in different cities show on my face.

I have wrinkles.

My life may be a little bit of a disaster. I may not make the best decisions sometimes. But I am not going to lie here and stare at the ceiling, worrying the night away.

Instead, I go to sleep soundly, believing I will do better tomorrow. Things will be better tomorrow. I’ll figure this all out tomorrow.

Tomorrow is, for me, a brand-new day.

This was an incredibly heartfelt and sweet coming-of-age story, a rather unusual fact given that our protagonist is technically an adult at 29 years of age.

As we all know, age means very little in terms of wisdom, maturity, and growth. Children have all sorts of beliefs about adulthood, mostly that one will eventually settle down. Life doesn't always work out that way, and some of us take longer to reach a final destination. As such, Hannah Martin's story and growth is one that I think is something to which most of us 20 and 30-somethings can closely relate.

It's an understatement to say that Hannah can't settle down. Since college, she has moved countless times, switched jobs (and boyfriends) relentlessly). She hasn't grown up, her haphazard lifestyle supported by a wealthy family. Why the wanderlust? Hannah doesn't even know herself.

I don’t move from place to place on purpose. It’s not a conscious choice to be a nomad. Although I can see that each move is my own decision, predicated on nothing but my ever-growing sense that I don’t belong where I am, fueled by the hope that maybe there is, in fact, a place I do belong, a place just off in the future. It’s hard to put into words, especially to someone I barely know. But then I open my mouth, and out it comes. “No place has felt like home.”

“Sometimes I worry I’ll never find a place to call home.”

After the latest incident in which Hannah ends up sleeping with a married man---and actually contemplating a future with him---Hannah decides that maybe it's time to go home.

“Look, I don’t even know that he’s married,” I said. But I did. I did know it. And because I knew it, I had to run as far away from it as I could. So I said, “You know, Gabby, even if he is married, that doesn’t mean I’m not better for him than this other person. All’s fair in love and war.”

Two weeks later, his wife found out about me and called me screaming.

He’d done this before.

She’d found two others.

And did I know they had two children?

I did not know that.

It’s very easy to rationalize what you’re doing when you don’t know the faces and the names of the people you might hurt. It’s very easy to choose yourself over someone else when it’s an abstract.

And I think that’s why I kept everything abstract.

Home being Los Angeles, California. (Or as a Southern California resident like me, calls it, Hell-A).

Back where she started, living with her best friend (an awesome black woman and her handsome husband, Mark! DIVERSITY, FUCK YEAH!), Hannah runs into a long, lost high school love, Ethan. High school sweethearts, first loves, broken up, as so many other couples are, when the inevitability of distance and circumstance separated them in college. Their reunion is bittersweet, full of questions for which there is no good answer.

“Something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while,” he says. “Why did we break up?”

I look at him and feel my head cock to the side ever so slightly. I’m genuinely surprised by the question. I laugh gently. “Well,” I say, “I think that’s what eighteen-year-olds do. They break up.”

The tension doesn’t dissipate.

“I know,” he says. “But did we have a good reason?”

I look at him and smile. “Did we have a good reason?” I say, repeating his question. “I don’t know. Teenagers don’t really have to have good reasons.”

The book almost feels like a choose your own adventure as two different timelines, two different possibilities unfold. That night splits, and Hannah's story unfolds in ways one would not expect. But in this universe of infinite potentials, in the string theory of love (cheesy, I know! Pun intended) anything is possible.

"There is another version of you out there, created the second the quarter flipped, who saw it come up tails. This is happening every second of every day. The world is splitting further and further into an infinite number of parallel universes where everything that could happen is happening. This is completely plausible, by the way. It’s a legitimate interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s entirely possible that every time we make a decision, there is a version of us out there somewhere who made a different choice. An infinite number of versions of ourselves are living out the consequences of every single possibility in our lives. What I’m getting at here is that I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices that led me somewhere else, led me to someone else.”

“And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”

This was a great book, with great writing and characterization. You think you know the ending? Just wait.