(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Life, we are told, is a series of sliding door moments.
Step one way, and your life will head down one, hopefully beneficial and rewarding course; go in the other direction and your trajectory takes on another look and feel entirely.
If the choices were clear cut and took place in a vacuum, where you could think clearly about the options before you, then perhaps all those doors sliding back and forth would lead to consistently good decisions, but the truth is, they often take place when a thousand other things are pushing down hard against you and you have to make decisions, sometimes life-changing decisions in a split second.
In Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime by Fiona McKenzie Kekic, we witness the result of this decision-making on the run as the titular character wakes up on her fiftieth birthday to discover her husband is having an affair, that she’s out of a job and that her impulsive, carpe-diem addicted mother and her father with dementia are lost somewhere in India.
To be fair, it doesn’t all happen on the same day but Eva’s milestone birthday is the catalyst for one hell of a trip, both geographical, as she races around India, using her mother’s cryptic-as-f*ck TikTok videos as her only guide, and existential as she begins a tumultuous journey into the fact that life isn’t what she planned for it to be, and that she is hopelessly lost in the wrong side of the sliding doors equation.
If my daughter is going to remember any birthday, it will be the one that I’d rather forget.
The possibility of hearing from Emily lifts my spirits. But only for as long as it takes to read the six words shouting at me from the screen.
Ernest Friend
YOUR HUSBAND IS HAVING AN AFFAIR!
While Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime is ostensibly about Eva setting out on impulse to save her parents from themselves – do they really need saving? Maybe, maybe not – what it really boils down is what do you do when it becomes glaringly obvious that the life you wanted isn’t even reflected in a passing glimmer of the life you have.
Eva knows deep down she’s not happy but like all of us, she ploughs on anyway, telling herself that a rumble of discontent, a sigh-heavy day-to-day plodding through a life that once seemed bountifully promising and excitingly alive with potential, is entirely natural for someone of her age.
After all, most of us don’t get the life we envisaged and that’s just part of the way life plays out.
But when her world is thrown into the blender, Eva is suddenly confronted, quite unwillingly, with the fact that the buoyantly talented journalistic TV talent of her twenties has given way to a discontented, unfulfilled woman with little-to-no fire in her belly, a marriage which is life support if it isn’t already effectively in the romantic morgue, and a person who was once ready to take on the world, come what may, but who had traded that gutsy approach to living for a quirt acquiescence to compromised life choices.
Eva has lost control of her own life and Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime is a glorious read about how she gets it back in ways that absolutely don’t accord with what she thinks will happen.
(courtesy official author site / (c) Clive Jeffery)
As someone who’s about a decade past Eva, this reviewer find a great deal of humourously but thoughtfully delivered truth in Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime.
While my relationship with my husband is wonderful, I often muse about what might have happened if I had made different choices about my career and I marvel, and not in a good way, at how the ridiculously confident young man I once was had given way to someone who feels defeated, exhausted and depressed more than they’d like to admit.
What Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime does beautifully is not only lay out what this feels like in ways that will make you chortle in recognition and knowing certainty that Eva’s fate is one that can befall even the most optimistically expectant of people, but also offer hope that the seeming end of the road is but an off-ramp to something far better.
It’s not an empty hope, either; thanks to some incisively emotional, thoughtful writing, wrapped inside some very funny scenes that amuse and strike deep at the same time, Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime actually makes the case for the fact that the end of things, the collapse of everything you know, even if it is long past its use-by date, might just be the best thing that has happened to you.
It might not feel like it at the time, and refreshingly, the author doesn’t minimise how distressingly shellshocky that feels, but the very worst of days can lead to the very best.
As I walk down the stairs to the street outside, I really feel like I’ve turned a corner. I have no idea what is around that corner, but I can’t wait to find out.
You’ve just got to get to them first, and much of the fun, and Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime is lots and lots of riotous fun as Eva races across the subcontinent in pursuit of her recklessly purposeful mum, with whom she’s had a fractious relationship at best, is reading as Eva hits potholes, and falls into craters, and stumbles up and over mountains before the rediscovery of who she is, that she didn’t know she desperately needed, can take place.
It’s a lot to have what you thought was a good life be revealed as a steaming pile of the proverbial, and the author well understands that the shock waves still kind of realisation sets off are not easy to grapple with.
But Eva, like many of us, once confronted with the truth, is able to slowly but surely get her head around where her sliding door moments went awry, with the help of a stubbornly right mother, knowing friends and an inner sense of self that comes roaring, step-by-step out of dormancy until it emphatically reasserts itself again.
Eva Reddy’s Trip of a Lifetime is a glorious piece of writing from a writer full of empathy, wit and gifted insight who knows that we don’t always open the right door as life rushes by us in a frenzy, but who also appreciates that it is possible to choose again, with your wits returned to you courtesy of older age with its hard-won perspective, and emotional sagacity, and come out the other side to a life reborn, a heart remade and a world that once again looks like it could be something quite wonderful, and on your own terms too.