Making It Up

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Marvellous - Rated
Penelope Lively has often written on the theme of memory, and on how the past affects and resonates in our present lives.

In this collection of short stories she develops this to investigate what might have happened if she had made different choices at certain turning points in her own life - and the result is satisfyingly thought provoking.

In each story a different character is put in a similar situation to one she found herself in - the characters are entirely convincing and show different sides to PL's own character. One of her most successful books.

It Could Have Been Her - Rated
It Could Have Been Her
The reader could be cruel about this book and take Lively at her word. It is a book of exercises to remove writers block or develop fiction which moves away, though remains linked to biographical sources. Her starting point is to chose a turning point or key decision in her life, and write a fictional incident that 'happened' as if she had made the decision the other way. The notion is stolen form historians who use counter factuals... 'suppose it had happened differently'?

Only Lively knows how successful this was in removing writer's block and other ills of the professional. We have a selection of the good results. The one I liked was 'Transatlantic' which tells the story of a women, Carol, who has made here home in America and is visiting, with her England Harvard Professor husband. They make a journey to meet in their home an aunt and here husband which have retired to the country. The reader comes to realise that this couple a frozen into the conservative English attitudes which Carol has left. There is no longer any empathy between the past and the present as it were. The move to America has cut off Carol from her past. Lively makes the embarrassment of the meeting palpable for Carol, thought her husband the reader is led to feel simple switches into the polite courtesies of New England on meeting strange people.

I was left not quite sure about the moral to be drawn, except perhaps that Lively had made the right decision not to make her home in the USA if she wanted to continue to draw on her biography formed in England.

What If?... - Rated
"Somehow, choice and contingency have landed you where you are, as a person that you are, and the whole process seems so precarious that you look back at those climatic moments when things might have gone entirely differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction, and wonder at this apparently arbitrary outcome." so says Penelope Lively as she begins to give us a feel for this new novel.

Penelope Lively begins with an introduction to the real circumstances, and ends with an afterward as to the actual outcome. She surmises some directing factor in her childhood that has been constant in her life - that she was programmed to become addicted to reading and writing, to prefer thoughtful, argumentative men and to want children. Unlike her mother who was happy enough to give complete custody to her father during their divorce when Penelope was 12.

'What If' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? Penelope Lively's first chapter describes an escape by boat to Capetown as a small child and the resultant changes.

'What If' she had gone to the Arts Ball with an older man dressed in jeans and shirt as a heady rite of passage - but suppose, in those pre-pill days, she had become pregnant, and faced social disgrace as a single mother, or death through a backstreet abortion.

'What If' she was a student on an archaeological dig and didn't believe she would live long because of the threat of the "bomb' in the 1970's. Is this comparable to the threat we feel today of the "bomb"?

'What If" she had not met the Englishman who became her beloved husband, but instead went on to postgraduate school in America and married an American?

'What If', her writing had not been appreciated and her writings had not become novels? Penelope Lively was a lonely child and delved into reading which brought her to her writing.

Penelope Lively goes on "When you're making climactic decisions, they do all cluster in younger life. Most of my crucial decisions seem to have been taken before the age of 25," she reflects. "I have always been fascinated by the business of choice and contingency, the way in which we think we make choices but we're directed by contingent events, from the little things like the car that won't start, to the large directives of history. Choice and contingency land you where you are, and the whole process seems so precarious, you look back at those moments when things might have gone entirely differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction." This book is everybody's daydreams made real. What might have been.. What If? Highly Recommended. prisrob