(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Reinvention is usually seen as something good, an exercise of personal agency that sees the old cast aside in favour of something hoped or believed to be new and different.
But what happens with reinvention is forced upon you, usually by some kind of trauma or another, and the status quo is trashed and burned and thrown out, leaving you not so much reinvented as simply devastated?
In Maggie Alderson’s Would You Rather, food stylist Sophie Crommelin finds herself the unwilling recipient of such a drastic change of circumstances, not once but twice, sundering all her plans for a relaxed new stage of life in her just-purchased new seaside in Hastings, East Sussex.
Suddenly, she has no choice but to head to Hastings all by herself, leaving her social network, bar one close friend who follows her to new home (well now and then, anyway); Sophie, however, is not alone, as her oldest son Beau finds himself embroiled in viral scandal back home in London and has to, with little-to-no forethought or planning, escape to Hastings too in the hope that it can provide what his hometown now cannot.
It’s seismic change for both them, and you might well imagine, it comes with significant emotional trauma and a sinking sense that life will never be that good again.
The challenge then is to work out how to make this forced reinvention work for you, rather than against you, and to find your feet when all you feel like you’re doing is drowning.
Sophie blinked and looked down again, relieved that everyone would think she was overcome with devastation at the prospect of reading her husband’s eulogy, not that she was in shock, having just looked right into the eyes of his mistress.
The kind of trauma that pushes the narrative along with equal amounts of terrifying trauma and exciting new possibility must be left to the seamlessly executed and wondrously immersive storytelling in Would You Rather, but suffice to say that makes this novel sing is how incisively honest Alderson is about the human experience.
While some good and great things happen to Sophie after the initial shock of her changed life circumstances, including possible new love, a gorgeous new found family of actual family members, neighbours and friends, and even one client, Alderson doesn’t pretend that the road to a new beginning will be an easy one.
Yes, there will ne fresh starts aplenty for everyone, including Beau, and Would You Rather celebrates the idea that out of ashes a new life can emerge phoenix-like, but it does it in such a way that all the of the novel’s charm and warmth feels full and real and very, very relatably human.
If restorative reinvention, even of the involuntary kind, is not your thing, and you like your escapism without a hint of any troubling humanity or dark shadow of reality troubling it, then perhaps Would You Rather may not be your ideal read.
But for anyone who treasures new beginnings built on the trauma and lessons of a scarred past, and wants reassurance that you can start again after the most terrible of things have happened to you, then Would You Rather will be your new favourite read.
(courtesy official X formerly known as Twitter account)
What is especially pleasing about this approach is that we get to read, almost in real time with just time jumps, what happens to someone when the existential rug is well and truly pulled out from under them.
Alderson doesn’t pretend the trauma and grief don’t toxically linger nor just she think moving somewhere new cures all ills; life isn’t that straightforward and Would You Rather doesn’t pretend otherwise, acknowledging that wound take time to heal, hearts take quite some months, if not years, to mend and that any happy ever after that may come down the track, is usually later rather than sooner.
This willingness to embrace the emotional brutality of real life doesn’t take away from the charm and hopefulness and humour of much of the story one bit; in fact, the emotional heft garnered by Alderson’s honesty makes all the good things that come later feel so real and true and beautifully earned.
Sophie, and Beau, and one other key character whose story shall remain cloaked in spoiler-free shadows but whose inclusion is a genius move adding so much emotional power to the story, do find life after the death of almost everything they knew, and when they do, it feels like the most wondrously good and grounded gift.
Sure, there are very few people who wouldn’t want a fairy godmother to wave a wand fix everything instantly, but life is rarely that accommodating, and Alderson understands that and folds it into Would You Rather in winningly rewarding ways, making the impact of the novel far more than it might otherwise have been.
Sophie was at Agata’s house with the group of people she realised she had just thought of in her head as ‘the Gang’. It made her smile, but that’s what this quite eccentric combination of herself and Tamar, with Agata, Olive, Cicely and Charlie were to her now, and it meant a lot. Tonight, Beau and Tamar’s friend Yewande has joined them at Agata’s. Of course, when Rey was down, he was part of the Gang too.
The Gang met up regularly for what they called ‘kitchen suppers’, because that’s where they ate them. They were always a hoot. So far there had been several at Sophie’s and Olive’s and a couple out at Charlie’s, but this was the first at Agata’s house — and it was the caviar and vodka set up of legend.
For all of its dedication to be emotionally honest, what Would You Rather also offers is a delightful drop of escapist hopefulness too.
It often feels like a great big hug but the kind that suggests not just ooey-gooey warmth-and-fuzzies but the real solace that comes from someone knowing just what to do and say when the worst of all possible things have happened.
It’s a joy to know things can get and stay better and much of the joy of this pulls-no-punches novel is that it well and truly follows through on the idea that unwelcome reinvention can quickly become the most welcome and beneficial of changes and serves up a hug of hope and possibility that has real emotional weight and heft to it.
Would You Rather gives you the gravity of things going south, and spectacularly so, with no warning, but it also reassures you that the very worst of times can be followed by the very best of times, and that like Sophie and Beau and their gaggle of wonderfully idiosyncratic but caring friends, life doesn’t end when trauma takes you down, and that in the most touching and heartfelt of ways, things can become not just good but astoundingly so, defying the odds and making all that unasked reinvention feel like the best thing that ever happened to you.