Matryoshka Dolls but its stories and real people ?!

Hi everyone!! 

I hope you had a great long weekend 🙂 This weekend was actually my brother’s birthday so I went with him and a few of my friends to Whistler to celebrate. Normally I have read most of our books as a PDF on my ipad, but in honour of this being our LAST BOOK – OMG CRAZY I CAN’T EVEN BELIEVE IT, I ordered it on amazon to read the physical copy. It was so nice and refreshing to read this while road tripping, UGH i forget how nice reading on a scenic drive is. 

So this week I read faces in the crowd by Valeria Luiselli. This was a really interesting read and the author did a great job playing with the concept of reality and perception and stories. The concept of all these stories intertwined and connected reminds me of those matryoshka dolls, you know like the doll within a doll, within a doll etc. I enjoyed reading it a lot. When I started reading this book it reminded me about another book I’ve read called Verity. Verity focuses a lot on the concept of what is real, and leaves the reader questioning everything they have just read. It’s an amazing book. I would definitely recommend it if you haven’t read it already. 

I made the immediate connection to Verity when reading the confusion her husband struggles with when reading her manuscripts, from what is true and what is not true. Because as she claims this is only just a book, it is just fiction … right? Verity is quite similar, a woman goes to a home of an author who is in a comatose state as she is hired to ghost write her last book. While looking through her notes she finds a journal of her thoughts and interactions, and she discovers quite disturbing content. We begin to see this ugly narrative of the lady in the coma and believe it is all true, yet later once she wakes she claims none of it was real and it was just a writing exercise to get in character for the book she was writing. We as readers begin to struggle to understand what was true and what was not. 

This obsession of writing and using bizarre methods to write reminded me of our narrator who also seems quite obsessed with her writing about Owen. Even in the book she writes “By now it’s an elaborate lie, repeated to myself so often that it’s come to form part of my repertory of events, indistinguishable from any other memory.” which was interesting to me. She has what seems almost like an unhealthy need to write this story.

Discussion Question: How do you navigate between what’s real and what’s imagined in your own life, especially when faced with complex narratives or experiences?