I’ve read several books by Cecelia Ahern over the years. I’ve liked some of them very much, others I found well-written and interesting, but not so appealing. Each one has been quite different, and some of them include slightly surreal elements as part of an otherwise ordinary setting - so when I see her books inexpensively at a church bookstall, I usually buy them. ‘The Time of my Life’ is one I picked up a few months ago, and I’ve just finished reading it.
Lucy is the narrator of this book. She’s approaching thirty, and insists she’s content, living in a tiny flat and working as a translator for manuals. She has plenty of friends, and she gets along with her brothers and mother although she finds her father very difficult. She keeps hoping for a connection with him, but he’s quite a cold, unpleasant person who has little interest in his adult offspring.
The story opens when Lucy finds a letter waiting for her. She’s received several such letters recently, and has ignored most of them. But she realises she’ll have to do something… so, rather reluctantly, she phones to make an appointment. With her life.
Yes, this is the bizarrely quirky element to this novel. Lucy’s life is a real person whose entire job consists of documenting and researching what she has done. It’s somewhat surreal, but seen as quite acceptable, if a tad unusual, to all the characters in the book. The logistics don’t add up - if I tried to over-think Lucy’s discussions with her life, or Life’s discussions with other people, I quickly became confused. It was better simply to accept this oddity as an everyday part of the story, as everyone else around her seems to do.
We quickly learn that Lucy is still in love with her former boyfriend Blake. He is a TV presenter and explorer who left her nearly three years earlier. However, nobody knows that he left her. She didn’t want to have friends feeling sorry for her, so they agreed to spread the story that she left him. Unfortunately this led to their mutual friends feeling sorry for Blake, and castigating Lucy as hard-hearted, insisting she had ruined his life.
That’s far from the case, as Blake has had many successes, whereas Lucy lost the job she liked the day after he broke up with her. She then moved from their shared and quite luxurious apartment into the cubbyhole she now occupies, and has felt as if her parents disapprove strongly, as they were quite keen on Blake. And she’s let a lot of things slide. She used to like cooking; now she microwaves ready-meals. Her flat is a mess, with stains on the carpet, and there isn’t really room for her furniture. The only thing she likes is her cat - and she’s not allowed to have a cat in the building.
I liked Lucy very much, and could mostly empathise strongly with her. She’s lost her motivation, and she cares more about other people than about her own circumstances. She’s also got into the habit of telling lies, some of them more serious than others; many of them resulted from the initial lie about her breakup with Blake. But she’s also in her job under false pretences, though nobody has yet found out…
It’s a character-based story, and I thought it done very cleverly. Lucy takes some positive steps, although she’s prone to getting things wrong, and life - or Life - gets in the way several times. Naturally enough there’s a love interest, and some family dynamics, and stresses at work. It’s believable (in a surreal kind of way, at times) and quite thought-provoking. It got me thinking about how lies - or simply unsaid truths - can spiral out of control, maybe over years or even decades.
And yet.. it didn’t grab me as some books do. I didn’t long to find out what was happening next, so I didn’t pick it up at every possible moment. That means it’s taken me several days to finish even though it’s quite light-weight in style. It would make a great holiday read in my view; it doesn’t require great mental effort (in fact, I don’t recommend using any, as the premise of Life as a person is too weird to be analysed) and it’s easy to put down.
Recommended if you like this author, or are interested in trying women’s fiction with an unusual twist.
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