Making It Up

Amazon.com

Making It Up, Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively's cleverly termed "anti-memoir," is an enthralling examination of how both fate and free will can dramatically alter the lives of each and every one of us. Each of Lively's expertly crafted stories reveals the life she could have lived, had she, or another, chosen a different path. Yet in answering a series of "what if" questions, Lively does more than indulge her imagination; rather, she challenges her readers to examine the consequences of both the significant, and the seemingly trivial decisions we make every day.

Each of the stories in Making It Up deals with a different stage of Lively's life, and examines fictional alternatives to the roads she and others traveled. The Mozambique Channel charts the course of Shirley, a British nanny who accompanies her employer's family to Capetown following the German invasion of Egypt in 1942. In reality, Lively's family emigrated to Palestine; in this alternative universe, the family encounters tragedy on the open seas. The Battle of the Imjin River sends Lively's husband off to fight in the Korean War, thus changing his fate and in turn her destiny. Most compelling of all is Comet, in which the fictional Lively's untimely death is the catalyst for a half sister's second chance at love.

At the end of most narratives, Lively makes a point of reminding readers that while these stories are fictional, they are not impossible. Perhaps is this sense of endless possibility, so expertly conveyed by this talented veteran, that makes this collection so completely riveting. In the end, we are all the ones "for whom things might have spun off elsewhere, who might have become someone else." --Gisele Toueg --This text refers to the

Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In this engrossing, perverse challenge to genre--"an anti-memoir"--Booker Award novelist Lively (Moon Tiger, 1987) explores the road not taken. What if her family, evacuating Egypt during WWII, had traveled to South Africa rather than Palestine? What if a date that ended chastely had led to unwed motherhood? What if her husband-to-be had been captured in Korea? What if that other Penelope had taken up with Achilles? What if Lively, who eventually became a writer, had, as a student, gone on an archeological dig? "This book is fiction," Lively warns. The narratives are inventions, rendered by an omniscient voice, framed by brief, evocative autobiographical passages, and peopled by non-Penelopes. Lively achieves "the authenticity of fiction" in their credibility, but she lived none of these alternative lives. Writers and would-be writers will be intrigued to observe the transformation of life into literature. Readers may enjoy wrestling with questions of choice and chance in human affairs, or they may settle for a series of neatly crafted tales. The vividly imagined lives stir up questions far more thought provoking than the simple "what if?" As Lively so elegantly demonstrates, "The paths do not so much fork as flourish." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the

Hardcover edition.