We Are Not Ourselves Book Club: Week 9

Meagan

The shower scene here was really hard to read and reminded me a lot of the movie The Judge. It must be so unbearably hard as a grown adult male to shit yourself and then have your family help clean you up. I hope to god with Alzheimer's you don't know this is happening. 

The sex stuff is weird and interesting to me. I knew she was going to sleep with Sergei but her having sex with Ed took me by surprise. I love her saying "a hunger for contact could overcome intractable impediments" which is soooo true isn't it? I also found it so sad her arguing with the nurse about releasing Ed because she just wanted him to go to a home but didn't want to decide. One of my favourite lines from any book or movie is in Manchester by the Sea when he says to his nephew "do you want me to decide for you?" re: seeing his dad's dead body... I think the hardest thing sometimes is just making the decision and having to live with it so I empathize with Eileen entirely here.

The Christmas party fiasco actually made me think of my own mom. Connell brings Ed home during the party because in his own naive mind, it will make his mom happy. He doesn't know her well enough/is not old enough to know how miserable this would be for her. It's like the way when I was younger I scrubbed the piano down with an SOS pad because I thought it would make my mom happy but I'm old enough now to know she's happier when she just cleans up herself. 

This section actually has made me think a lot.

Meghan

The stuff with Sergio and Eileen is pretty upsetting. I think the scene where they go for breakfast is the most well written scene in this book so far. It made me so so sad to read, and it’s a moment I feel like a lot of people relate to. It reminded me of the scene in Girls where Hannah and Adam are sitting across from each other realizing they just can’t make it work, things need to end.

Obviously this is a topic that always really gets to me. And I loved, loved, loved this quotation below:

"Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren't that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they'd been had found release through a necessary valve."

This is another small writeup, but this is pretty much my main takeaway from this section. Things are about the same with Connell and Ed, but things with Eileen have gotten even harder.