Fiction #11 in 2009 – Life Sentences: A Novel by Laura Lippman

Life Sentences: A Novel by Laura Lippman

From Publishers Weekly (amazon.com):

This stunning stand-alone from bestseller Lippman (Baltimore Blues) examines the extraordinary power and fragility of memories. Writer Cassandra Fallows achieved critical and commercial success with an account of her Baltimore childhood growing up in the 1960s and a follow-up dealing with her adult marriages and affairs. The merely modest success of her debut novel leads her back to nonfiction and the possibility of a book about grade school classmate Calliope Jenkins. Accused of murdering her infant son, Jenkins spent seven years in prison steadfastly declining to answer any questions about the disappearance and presumed death of her son. Fallows (white) tries to reconnect with three former classmate friends (black) to compare memories of Jenkins and research her story. In the process, she discovers the gulf (partially racial) that separates her memories of events from theirs. Fallows’s pursuit of Jenkins’s story becomes a rich, complex journey from self-deception to self-discovery.

My thoughts:

• The book raised an interesting topic, especially since memoir is so popular nowadays -  how accurate is our memory? Especially for memoir? We have all heard of those “fake” memoirs that came out recently, whether it was done on purpose (to sell) or did we really just remember things differently than others? Seriously, I don’t remember a lot of my own details when my husband told me such and such happened. Ummm, made me nervous after reading Still Alice :p

• There was one big hole/mystery about the character Aubrey that was never answered. I got frustrated. Searched online for spoiler and found that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t figure it out (I was feeling dumb about it). Finally, found that the author answered the mystery on Face Book’s “Life Sentences” page (after a reader asked her about it, see, so I wasn’t the only one!) and still not really satisfied with the answer – partly because now I have forgotten who-is-who in the book. Plus the answer should have been included in the book in the first place since it was a critical point.

• So interesting concept, but didn’t quite delivered.