We’ve all heard the jokes about memory getting worse as we age—putting things in a safe place only to forget the safe place, walking into a room and forgetting why we’re there, losing our keys when they’re in our hand or our glasses when they’re on our head.

I have experienced all of those things (the first one just in the last couple of weeks) and probably many more. Yet I can remember complete lyrics to songs I learned in the 80s. In fact, when I wrote the title of this post, I started singing (in my head) “We All Fall in Love Sometimes,” a song released on Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album in 1975! 🎶 “Wise men say, it looks like rain today….” 🎶 But I digress.

Memory on its own is a funny thing, but everyone has moments where their mind plays tricks on them, no matter how old they are. And it’s not just memory. It’s like your brain has a short in it for a moment. How many times have you been talking with someone who corrects something you said, and your response is, “That’s what I said.” They laugh and tell you that it wasn’t, but you would swear that you said the right thing. You can’t both be right.

My daughter Corinne is 15. She gets good grades in school, has a sharp mind and a great memory. But even her mind plays tricks on her sometimes.

A few weeks ago, we had our shih-poo puppy neutered, so he was walking around with the cone of shame on his head for about a week and a half. Since he sleeps on the bed, I was worried that he would lose his balance and fall off, so I spent that week and a half sleeping on an air mattress in the home office. (The things we do for our pets, right?)

One morning at about 4:30, I woke up to find Corinne sitting on the step into the office wrapped in a blanket in front of the heat vent. When I asked her what she was doing up, she replied that she just woke up so she decided to just get up for her zero hour class. Her class starts at 7, so I knew she was really half asleep, but it made me laugh and I told her what time it was. By that point, she was aware enough to realize that she should really still be in bed, so she got up and went back to bed.

We had a good laugh about it when we got back up, and we still laugh about it every time we talk about it. I wanted to make sure she was ok with me sharing the story, so when I asked her “Can I use the 4:30 in the morning story in my blog?” she knew exactly which story I was talking about. She still has no idea why her brain told her it was almost time for school, but she understood the reference without any explanation.

So what happens when you regularly can’t trust your own mind? R.J. Jacobs wrote a book with a heroine who knows exactly what that’s like.

Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for And Then You Were Gone by R.J. Jacobs

282 pages
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Publication Date: March 13, 2019
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books.

Publisher’s Description

After years of learning how to manage her bipolar disorder, Emily Firestone finally has it under control. Even better, her life is coming together: she’s got a great job, her own place, and a boyfriend, Paolo, who adores her. So when Paolo suggests a weekend sailing trip, Emily agrees—wine, water, and the man she loves? What could be better? But when Emily wakes the morning after they set sail, the boat is still adrift… and Paolo is gone.

A strong swimmer, there’s no way Paolo drowned, but Emily is at a loss for any other explanation. Where else could he have gone? And why? As the hours and days pass by, each moment marking Paolo’s disappearance, Emily’s hard-won stability begins to slip.

But when Emily uncovers evidence suggesting Paolo was murdered, the investigation throws her mania into overdrive, even as she becomes a person of interest in her own personal tragedy. To clear her name, Emily must find the truth—but can she hold onto her own sanity in the process?

************

This description for R.J. Jacobs’ And Then You Were Gone immediately made me think of the movie Double Jeopardy, where a woman wakes up on a boat after a night of romance to find her husband gone, a blood-soaked boat, and eventually herself accused of murder. While the execution of the story lines weren’t the same, I was not disappointed in the way this book played out.

I have seen a number of reviewers who were put off by what seems like disjointed narration, but the protagonist Emily is bipolar, so the narration of the story from Emily’s point of view takes us increasingly further into her manic state of mind as she tries to figure out what the heck happened. She begins to distrust her own thoughts, we as readers can’t trust her point of view, and that is exactly the point!

While Emily knows that she didn’t have anything to do with Paolo’s disappearance, she feels the paranoia creeping in. Paolo’s colleague Sandra comes to Emily with “evidence,” and Emily can’t decide whether Sandra is telling the truth or trying to implicate Emily even more. Paolo’s best friend Cal seems to be listening to Emily, but he never really liked her, so she begins to question his loyalty as well. But she feels like she just has to keep going. She has to get to the answer. And so did I!

I didn’t get through this nearly as quickly as I wanted to just because life was busy, but I didn’t want to stop reading. Along with Emily, I suspected at first that Paolo had disappeared, not died. When she became a murder suspect, I had to start to question whether she had something to do with Paolo’s disappearance/death or if someone was trying to frame her. This is a great whodunit that you’ll want to pick up.

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