(no subject)

[skygiants]

I read Jo Walton's My Real Children for book club last month, which many people who know me in real life now know because I briefly acquired a bad habit of going around saying things like "well, I've made my decision and ideally it won't accidentally lead to nuclear war!"

My Real Children follows a woman named Patricia Cowan through two alternate timelines: one in which she marries a dude named Mark when he asks her, and one in which she doesn't.

Personally, marrying Mark is definitely a mistake, because Mark is an asshole -- which is not to say that Trish's life is miserable forever because she made a mistake, but, you know, there's a significant period of misery time in there. On the other hand, the world in which Trish marries Mark is, on a global scale, significantly better than the world in which Pat dumps Mark and finds True Love with a woman (Bee) and a city (Florence) and is generally very happy with her personal choices; Pat's world is even more deeply messed up than our current one, in a hundred small and large ways that do and don't affect Pat and her overall wonderful family life. How exactly these changes to world history have come about is not necessarily clear or obvious.

In both worlds she has children, and loves them, with some complications.

(In the Pat-and-Bee world, the father of their children is a secular Jewish guy who said a couple things that made me put the book down and side-eye it for a minute -- "I'm Jewish, of course I speak Hebrew;" dude, you are a secular Jew! in England! there is no 'of course' there! -- but this is a relatively minor caveat.)

Mostly it's a relatively straightforward narrative of two different lives lived differently, by someone who starts out as the same person, but is arguably not by the end. Sad things happen, because sad things eventually happen in every life. There are small tragedies and large tragedies, and people get old, and people die. Things are terrible for some people and don't affect others. A whole city gets wiped off the map, but if you're not in the country where it happens, then, I mean ... it's sad, but you get on with things .........? (Which is the sort of thing Jo Walton has always excelled at, how it's possible to live a perfectly normal life around fairly terrible things.)

I read the end of the book as implying the necessity of a choice between the two worlds and lives, and I did not like that and wished it was not necessary. Other people argued that they did not read the ending as requiring a choice at all, that 'the person her life had made her' had to be both Trish and Pat at once. Which I like much better, but I don't know if it's what I actually think the book is doing.

Comments

[rymenhild]

I didn't mind the choice because I thought it made sense and I had a clear sense in my mind of which one I believed she chose.

I haven't read the book since it first came out, but here is my comment from a Making Light spoiler thread:

In my own reading, I was immediately convinced that Patricia chooses Trish's world. Trish, the antiwar activist, would choose it. Pat, the woman who loved the world and the people in it, would choose it. I think even Bee, given the choice between a loving family and a better, safer world for herself, would choose it. A better world for everyone is more important, given the way Pat and Trish and Bee live their lives, than a better world for Patricia alone.

The other half of what I've been thinking is that it's not at all clear that Pat's life is a better life than Trish's. Certainly Trish is miserable in her marriage, and in the early chapters after the split, I was hating Mark hard and waiting for Tricia's chapters to end so I could see the awesome things Pat was doing. But Pat's intense joys, in her work, in her love for Florence, in her love for Bee and Michael and their family, are countered later in life by equally intense sufferings. Pat first takes care of Bee after her injury from a terrorist bomb, and then sees both Michael and Bee through their deaths from post-nuclear cancers that would not have happened / do not happen in Trish's world.

Pat arrives at the nursing home suicidal with grief; her children have saved her life, but she's lost her caretaker and her love. Trish arrives at the nursing home reluctantly -- she's been able to take care of herself up to this point with the help of found family, grandchildren and Internet access.

So in the last years of their separate lives, Pat suffers and Trish finds fulfillment, in a neat reversal of Pat's earlier fulfillment and Trish's earlier suffering.

One life isn't better than the other -- except in the effects of war. I'm sure, in my own heart, that Patricia chooses Trish. What happens then, as Patricia's life story iterates again? I don't think I quite need to know. The choice is all.

[rachelmanija]

That's a really interesting perspective, because on the surface it does seem like Pat has a better life. I mean, she gets Bee and Florence! But yeah, then everyone dies and the world is falling apart, and she ends up at the nursing home anyway.

I did like the question of a better life in a worse world versus a worse life in a better world. It's similar to a question I've thought of a lot, which is whether I'd rather live in an ideal world in which my existence doesn't matter in the overall scheme of things (because it's already ideal, there's nothing I can do to improve it) or in our actual world, in which so much is wrong that my (or anyone's) actions will always make a difference if you choose to do right, and the only question is by how much.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I felt like it was pretty much even for both of them at the end; they both have rough things happen because rough things happen in everyone's life, sooner or later. I don't know that I would say that Pat's life is worse at the end than Bee's is, but both of them have their great joys & great sorrows etc.

http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/443835.html?view=9262779&posted=1#cmt9260731

[skygiants]

Ha, see, I find that very unsatisfying -- the idea that one life, one set of children, needs to essentially un-become. And of course it's not un-becoming, I suppose, if the life subsequently lived is different as a result of both those choices, but I don't feel like I know that it is! What I least like is the stark either-or of it. I wish there was a third option in between yes and no.

[jinian]

This book gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies partly for that reason. The rest of the reason is down to the premise from the start; you're disempowered and mentally out of it and your life might never have happened. I read the thing in beta, was unable to offer useful comments at all, and had to leave Jo's reading at Wiscon because of existential horror. I still cannot even.

(I like her writing! Lots of the middle was very good! But aaaaagggghhhhhh.)

[skygiants]

I will say, one thing I did really like, especially about the beginning, was how well Jo Walton seemed to me to be writing from inside the head of a person with that kind of mental disorientation -- like, it's hard and it sucks, but she's still very much a person and a person capable of thought and rationalization etc. Which is pretty rare, that I can remember seeing in other stuff.