The Imagined Life

★★★★★★★★½☆ 8.5/10

320 pages

What’s it about?

Steven Mills is nearing 50 and his life seems to be unraveling. He has moved out from his California home (with his wife and son) and seems to be unmoored. He decides to look into the disappearance of his own father almost 40 years ago, in hopes of figuring out his own life.

What did it make me think about?

What a writer!

Should I read it?

This book is set in the early 1980’s at a small college in California. Because I was in college in the early 1980’s, and the daughter of a professor, this whole novel had a strong feeling of nostalgia to me. Not in the sense that our families were similar, but the author does such a great job of conveying that time in history. Who didn't live through the late 1970’s through the early 1980’s and hear Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album on the radio all the time? The setting of the story was all so familiar. The writing is beautiful and the pages move along, but it is a slower paced novel. This is a novel about memory, loss, and forgiveness. I found this novel haunting, and well worth reading.

A passage I marked

“I remember the sun being high in the sky that day, the midwinter air crisp and cool, everything quiet. I remember standing at my familiar perch behind the kitchen sink, looking out at them through the kitchen window, watching the digital numbers on the kitchen stove turn, waiting for Chau to call, the sound of Stevie Nicks voice drifting in from my bedroom: She is dancing away from you now, she was just a wish, she was just a wish. And in the distance, the quick flicker of sunlight on the pool water, a kind of dance that pulled you in, the undulating ripples and waves of refracted light moving in an unsteady rhythm, a kind of harmony, a trance.”